Author: Don Malvasi

With his self-effacing wit and nonplussed air of bewilderment, Matt Pandamiglio, an aspiring standup comic, walks and literally sleepwalks us through his odyssey from oblivion to self-discovery. Often narrating from behind the wheel of a car and even more frequently bookending his frightening yet funny episodes with REM sleep disorder with seriocomic asides, Pandamiglio (real-life comedian Mike Birbiglia, who also directs) makes us care even though he assumes an attitude of could-care-less.

His particular sleep disorder, we come to learn, involves the physically acting out of his dreams–often nightmares–as they happen. Strange, uncanny scenes ensue. At first embarrassing and eventually dangerous, the well-rendered, surreal sleepwalking dreams perform a dual purpose of offsetting the comic elements of the story. Added to his commitment phobia with girlfriend Abby (Lauren Ambrose, Six Feet Under) and his battles with an eccentric, Gracie Allen-ish mom (Carol Kane) and an overbearing dad (James Reborn, never better), Sleepwalk With Me etches the multi-faceted evolution of a comic finding his own voice while losing his footing. As he incorporates more of his autobiographical demons into his act, he begins to turn a corner creatively. A spot-on wry and insensitive 70-ish lady agent books him at a high school lip-sync contest, then as low-pay opening act in a zig-sagging tour replete with faceless motel rooms, a broken down car, and more sleepwalking episodes. Unable to tone down his late night food consumption and before-bed internet/phone activity as prescribed by a sleep disorder physician (who appears in Matt’s car with him in a hilarious scene), Matt does what many a touring artist would do: hangs out with and parties with other comics. That’s when this sleepwalking stuff really goes off.

As for Abby, she’s been going with him for years and wants marriage. It’s a subtle yet effective point of the film that even though they head in the direction of her goal, the only time we witness the otherwise loyal and supportive Abby in an audience at one Matt’s gigs is very early on when he’s bartending at a comedy club and doing last-minute fill-ins onstage. She never says anything, yet afterward when asked how they liked the gig, her friends quip, “we’ve seen it before during college.” As Matt riskily starts working his relationship into his act, the big payoff of a horrified Abby in his audience never comes. She’s not at any of his gigs. Is Abby guilty by omission?

Based on Birbiglia’s one-man 2008 theatrical piece, Sleepwalk With Me may be occasionally light and uneven around the edges but, essentially, in upending our preconceptions of films about comedians and ambition, it makes a sizable impression. Birbiglia’s alter ego is more than likeable. He’s simultaneously biting and skittish with an outsized candor. Life may be throwing him curves but he’s got a guiding inner radar, often possibly irrational but never inauthentic.

3.5 Sleepwalking and Commitment Hijinks (out of 5)

When a comedic take on phone sex is content to wrap a chick buddy flick around antiseptic sex jokes and ha-ha wobbly sentiments, the result is more grossly uneven than grossly funny. For a Good Time, Call…suffers not a little from Bridesmaids envy. The smartly done, acerbic Bridesmaids. The two leads here (Lauren Anne Miller and Air Graynor) may have relative savvy, but ludicrous premises and plot contrivances spoil much of the fun. While you could say a straight arrow chick (Miller, who also co-wrote the screenplay) brazenly taking on her roommate’s secret phone sex business falls somewhere in the neighborhood of female empowerment, it’s mostly a moxie undermined by derivative humor and crippling female friendship sitcom-isms. The film professes naughtiness, only to feel much too sanitized.

Not all the jokes are flat. The chemistry between Miller and Graynor, when not overtly hearts-and-flowers cheerful, is often robust. Despite Graynor having dropped pee on (you read that right) Miller ten years back, they’re thrown together as roommates by a gay mutual friend (Justin Long), who’s a comedian. (Nobody has real jobs in this flick yet the shared apartment is palatial and overlooks Gramercy Park.) This after Miller’s breakup with a boyfriend (Mark Webber) who calls her “boring.” Needless to say, he’s a bonafide cad by film’s end. But not before the repressed Miller at first discovers Graynor’s surreptitious phone operator gig, proceeds to help her out in a hands-off business-wise fashion, then eventually, well, you can guess. We also have parents who just show up at the door (what, an apartment this nice doesn’t even have a door buzzer let alone a doorman?), a repeat phone customer who becomes a crush of one of our co-stars, and an unlikely job in publishing to interfere with our storybook heroes’ business partnership. The whole thing feels as dated as a Walkman since first-time director Jamie Travis didn’t even bother to set this thing in a previous decade. Don’t know much about phone sex except that it’s probably gone the way of Duran Duran.

There are a couple of nice cameos (both of course phone customers): one whom you’ll definitely recognize, maybe not the other. Those I won’t spoil. For a good time, see Bridesmaids.

2.5 Dildos Left On The Coffee Table (out of 5)

Compliance, the third recent film to plausibly deal with people-who-couldn’t-possibly-be-THAT-dumb, is neither a documentary (The Imposter) nor a lurid thriller (Killer Joe), though it feels like both. The first impression in this frightening docudrama is that the highly uncomfortable situation depicted is largely the fault of the new all-time champion for main characters with shit-for-brains. Meet Sandra , who runs a fast food joint in Ohio. (Unlike The Imposter and Killer Joe, we can’t even blame a Texas setting). She possesses an unsettling combination of vulnerability and arrogance yet we’ll come to eventually discover that despite her grave shortcomings she’s probably only the second most foolish character in the film.

Sandra (an effectively understated Ann Dowd), an insecure middle-aged woman, fears her district manager’s inevitable discovery that one of her employees left the freezer door open overnight. So pressure surrounds an imminent busy weekend shift made the more miserable by the exclusion of bacon on the menu due to the freezer snafu. Sandra gives staff pep talks one minute, then lets her guard down the next, unsuccessfully trying to ingratiate herself with her much younger employees. One of whom is a perky blonde named Becky (Dreama Walker), who seems like a pretty normal teenager.

Then a phonecall comes in that will change the life of Becky and Sandra and will have you squirming in your seat. I’m sure screenings of Compliance often include multiple audience mutterings and exclamations back at the screen as a phony cop basically talks Sandy into strip-searching Becky, who he accuses of stealing money from a customer. Seems he needs Sandra to help him out with his investigation. Needless to say, he’s as slick as she is clueless and it doesn’t end there. Far from it.

Directed by Craig Zobel, Compliance proceeds to both horrify and taunt its audience. As unctouous as the man on the phone is, Sandra’s gullibility trumps it, allowing the viewer to take on an air of superiority to the proceedings. This could never happen to us. Yet who can begin to rule out complacency to authority figures in one regard or another? In a strictly workplace scenario? In the society at large? It’s fitting that Compliance contains at least two characters who don’t buy into the nonsense. Some critics, not far off the mark, have included civilian complicity in war crimes as within the scope of this film’s metaphoric focus. Luckily, the film is somewhat deceivingly grounded in the pulpy sphere (complete with plenty of cellos in Heather McIntosh’s effective score) which can either offset or ironically heighten the serious underpinnings, depending on how deep you want to go.

Before we give Zobel too much credit let us ask ourselves how can we be sure he’s not pulling a slick trick of his own here? Does he take poetic license and exaggerate? Apparently enough of these kinds of incidents existed “in real life” to warrant our full trust. Yet the devil was never more in the details. Unwilling to hang its hat solely on Sandra’s stunning naivete, Compliance goes the extra mile and presents both an overtly disciplined and studied perpetrator (an excellent Pat Healy), and a victim with just the right amount of initial outrage and eventual resignation (newcomer Walker). Compliance may be pushing the envelope ever so slightly but if this film were an earthquake the difference would be merely a meager fraction on the Richter scale. A disaster is a disaster and like most, it’s hard to divert our eyes.

4 You’ve Got To Be Kidding’s (out of 5)

The ultra-talented French actress Julie Delpy continues to grow most impressively in her new film 2 Days in New York, which she directs, and which co-stars Chris Rock in a much more than comic role. Rock plays Mingus, who lives with Marion (Delpy) and each of their two kids from other relationships. The situation is a doozy: Marion’s dad, sister, and sister’s boyfriend (who’s also an ex-boyfriend of Marion’s) visit New York to attend a gallery show of Marion’s photographs and to meet Mingus. They all hole up in Marion and Mingus’ small apartment. Cross-cultural chaos ensues.

The film’s a small riot. Frenzied, hilarious shenanigans follow Marion’s father Jeannot (played by Delpy’s real-life father Albert Delpy), her sister Rose (Alexia Landeau, who cowrote the screenplay with Delpy), and the boyfriend Manu (Alex Nahon, also co-credited with the screenplay). They all co-starred in Delpy’s 2007 prequel 2 Days in Paris, where an American boyfriend (Adam Goldberg) descends into the family’s inner sanctum. Here they invade America. The uber-earthy, often outrageous Jeannot arrives at the airport with unpasteurized cheeses taped to his body, Rose walks around the apartment in various states of undress, and Manu is about as gruff and inappropriate as a Sasha Baron Cohen character. Rock’s character changes from an immune doesn’t-bother-me to a frustrated center of gravity going askew, to a guy who complains in monologues to a cardboard cutout of Barack Obama that’s a life-size piece of furniture in his study. Finally Mingus, who’s a Village Voice writer and radio talk show host, resorts to describing his significant other’s crazy family to his radio audience. Comics who can play the serious role (Robin Williams, Adam Sandler) bolster their acting repertoire while often surprising their fans. Here Rock plays it three-quarters straight and it’s perfectly nuanced. The Franco-American tensions are mussed up even further given Rock’s additional fish-out-of-water role as a black boyfriend.

Marion tries to keep her family in tow as they proceed to spread havoc in Marion’s building and elsewhere. She has her own photography show to worry about and there’s an odd auction which I’ll leave undescribed except to say it eventually involves Vincent Gallo, who plays himself (wait, doesn’t he always?) A scene with Delpy and a particularly persnickety art critic ends poignantly if chaotically. Dylan Baker’s around as a neighbor caught in Rose’s web of possible seduction.

America and France, comic opposites framed by the additional presence of a Chris Rock. There would be plenty here if Delay left it at that. She manages, however to tie in a warm and effervescent turn to the more serious once she brings to the film the unexpected theme of the passing of her mom, the French actress Marie Pillet. The more serious Delpy reached a crescendo in the excellent Richard Linklater films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the latter which Delpy co-wrote the screenplay. Here she manages to combine madcap Woody Allen-esque comedy with the candor of self-realized semi-biography. Delpy, who now lives in L. A., keeps a dual citizenship. Amidst the laughter brought on here there lurks an outside-the-box approach to filmmaking, full of a robust duality all its own.

4 Wild Francophiles (out of 5)

Celeste and Jesse Forever’s notion of what it means to lay out a romantic comedy may not coincide with your own. Despite successful scenes, the film is an illustration that merely finding an innovative approach to a hackneyed genre does not necessarily produce a fresh nor particularly cohesive result.

A film starring Rashid Jones and Andy Samberg, Celeste profiles a couple on the way to divorce court who are still very much codependent. Some novel stuff is offset by essentially a thin, erratic screenplay that too often veers off into loose-limbed detours. Jones’ reluctantly reenters the dating game after Samberg suddenly decides to marry a one-night stand who got pregnant. Her reactions are amusing and insightful at first, then run out of gas the more they’re repeated into the ground. The couples’ wear-it-like-a-placard friendship survives throughout the film and actually seems to intensify the more Samberg moves into his new relationship and the more Jones’ life gets complicated. A side story involves Emma Roberts as a teen starlet for whom Jones’ employer serves as publicist, and Jones at first as an “older woman” adversary and eventually as a nurturer/babysitter. A scandal that erupts involving a suggestive graphic in an important ad she places is about as believable as the tooth fairy. But at least Jones has a job. Her reluctance to bear the slacker Samberg’s kids is cited by her as reason for the breakup. Enough to make you flinch a little but it doesn’t help Samberg is about as emotive as a ramen noodle. When he finally stands up for himself it’s as if the Red Sea is parting. Our shock doesn’t last long. Before we know it we’re off to several scenes with co-screenwriter Will McCormack playing an amusing pot dealer friend to Jones, and Elijah Woods playing the obligatory gay co-worker/confidant.

Not all is shabby with this hard-trying effort co-written by Jones (the daughter QuIncy Jones and Mod Squad’s Peggy Lipton). Chris Messina (recently of Ruby Sparks, where he plays Paul Dano’s brother) is along for the ride as a guy who admittedly takes yoga classes to meet women. Yet he demonstrates a patient fondness for Jones and actually shows her a good time.

Good times are infrequent in Celeste and Jesse Forever. The void is occasionally filled with surgically precise snapshots of the actual emotions and nuances of a breakup between two people still very much in love. Too often, though, the scalpel goes flying off into a waiting room of ads with hidden penises, bimbo teen millionaires, and a patchwork of new cliches replacing the old ones.

2.5 Wispy Contrivances (out of 5)

White trash dolts. Trailer park narcissists. Total loop jobs.

Welcome to Killer Joe, William Friedkin’s new NC-17 noir that’s as demented as a hyena on acid, yet strangely perceptive and chillingly funny.

What happens when an ignoramus (Thomas Haden Church) and his grandiose if equally ignorant son (Emile Hirsch), throw all morals out the window and decide to off their respective ex-wife and mom for the insurance jingle? Can you say crude to a welldone pulpy? Think something might go wrong after they hire creepy detective and moonlighting hitman Matthew McConaughey? You have no idea. Keep your eye on Gina Gershon, Church’s current wife, and let the sick action flow. Church’s daughter (and Hirsch’s sister) Juno Temple, enters the fray as human “retainer” for the deliberate and ultranasty McConaughey.

Friedkin keeps his tongue in his cheek no matter how depraved and outrageous things get (no small feat). You’ll laugh with him, not at him. You don’t direct The Exorcist and then subsequently forget how to do shockjng with just the right remove. Here the sum of the glaringly blunt individual parts impacts with something extra. Call it a giddy look at a substrata of America that is all too ripe for the picking. Or, if you must, a pessimistic commentary on the bane of evil that permeates our lives. You’ll have the time of your life if you can stomach it.

Based on Tracy Letts’s (Pulitzer-winning August Osage County) play, there’s a not unpleasant stagy quality to the proceedings. It’s as if Lars Von Trier woke up one day and decided to do Raymond Chandler and turn the violence hose up several notches. Friedman keeps things eerie and sinister without clobbering us. He refuses to paper over in the slightest the wrongheaded foibles of a family run amock. Yet his seriocomic sweep miraculously wrestles control where none seems possible. Ever ready to spin out of control, Killer Joe’s characters’ basest of instincts become unhinged as we watch incredulously. It veers into areas simultaneously foreign and familiar, providing now a knowing if jolting shudder, then a nervous and not unsavory laugh.

4 Loop Jobs (out of 5)

Searching for Sugar Man, the story of Sixto Rodriguez, a Dylanesque musician discovered in his native Detroit in 1968, is a saga almost too fantastic to be believed. Faded into near-total obscurity after two album releases, Rodriguez’ records make a huge splash in the anti-apartheid community of early 1980’s South Africa of all places. He becomes a folk hero with all the appeal of an Elvis or the Beatles.

Only for a long time he never knew it. The information flow in and out of the essentially fascist South Africa of the time, was practically nonexistent. Censors there actually took to scratching the vinyl grooves of a particularly anti-authority song on one of Rodriguez’s LP’s. Yet the cult surrounding Rodriguez’s records, initially believed to have been started by a smuggled copy, flourished nonetheless.

This first time documentary by Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul ably swings back and forth from Detroit to Capetown. Generous samples from Rodriguez’s first two LP’s, Cold Fact and Coming To Reality (both originally released on Sussex Record) pepper what is essentially an unravelling of the great mystery surrounding Rodriguez’s rediscovery. Rumored dead after setting himself on fire onstage, lo and behold his adoring fans’ delight when he is actually found to be alive and well and working as a laborer in Detroit!

His initial tour of South Africa in the late 90’s, where he played to six sold-out stadiums, is rendered from the point of view of his worshipful fans. A parallel to the Beatles gig at Shea Stadium isn’t that outlandish ….Yet our filmmaker deprived us of much of any live footage during that concert. You can’t help but wonder was he hiding something?

Another elephant lurks in the room as well: why not an iota of information on Rodriguez’s apparent total creative hiatus for 25 years? Did he write ANYTHING new? And these three grown daughters who are interspersed through the film: why not a single word about who their mother was? What we get instead is an exploration of the money trail, or actual total lack of a money trail concerning any royalties owed to Rodriguez. An interview with Sussex founder and former Motown Records executive Clarence Avant pretty much puts to rest the absurdity of the dream that anyone would care two shits about honoring a 30 year old contract on a defunct record label. Avant is snarling and huffy but his words sum up the raw deal musicians have gotten over the years, especially during the decades depicted here.

Not that Rodriguez cares a lick. One of the main beauties of his story is how he gives away to family and friends nearly all the money earned in subsequent successful tours of South Africa. Also content to continue living in modest digs in working class Detroit, he ultimately comes off as a near saintly figure.You’ll want to know more, a lot more, about him after viewing this film. Start with the reissues of his recordings on Light In The Attic Records. One of his producers, Steve Rowland, comments in the film that the Rodriguez song “Cause” may be the “saddest song I’ve ever heard.” Them’s big words! Yet the infectious, authoritative melancholy of these songs most reminds me of that take-to-a-desert-island Van Morrison classic LP, Astral Weeks….Rodriguez will appear on David Letterman on August 14 and he’ll gig at World Cafe Live in Philadelphia on October 28.

4 Resurrected Legends (out of 5)

Spoiler: beware of quiet, knife-yielding, humiliated damsels with a class grudge. Or maybe you’d rather sit through Winterbottom’s new film, Trishna, based on the Thomas Hardy classic Tess of the D’eubervilles. Its star, Frieda Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire), is very photogenic and has an alluring if distant screen presence. You’ll also get a real feel for India, where the film takes place, that will make the recent The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel seem like a mere postcard in comparison. Shot on location in Jaipur and Mumbai, Trishna is Winterbottom’s third adaptation of Hardy and modern India would seem perfect fodder for a tale of socio-economic cultural comparisons.

Winterbottom (see his excellent Road To Guantanamo and the recent The Trip) fashions a story about a woman from a lower caste, Trishna (Pinto), being swept off her pauper feet by a rich guy who is not only from a higher social plane, he’s not even fully Indian. Only they must sneak and hide their love, which comes well-earned for Jay (Riz Ahmed), who chases after Trishna at great distances more than once. He seems to always show up to rescue her, no matter the circumstances. Once he literally swoops her onto his motorbike just before she is in danger of getting attacked by two ominous men. The film has a habit of cutting to travelogue-style lush scenes of India’s teeming cities or the lush gardens of a plush hotel (owned by Jay’s father) where Jay sets up Trishna with a job. Winterbottom, who wrote the screenplay, has a problem of covering for his inexpressive lead characters with such embellishment. Is he merely accurately expressing Trishna’s diffident deference to Jay, or hiding behind it? A lot of the film meanders with the inertia of the two leads’ non-chemistry. We’re given a somewhat good feel for the oppression of Trishna, at first by her circumstances, and then eventually by Jay. It doesn’t hep a key scene involving Jay’s initial seduction of Trishna occurs off-camera. Then late his movement from great-guy savior to deviant scumbag seems to come out of nowhere, or, more specifically, one (quite understandable) blunder from Trishna that causes Jay to overreact in a way that would have seemed a lot more credible if we’d been given more character development and less atmospheric fluff.

For what it’s worth, Winterbottom also went out of his way to make the film flat in terms of eroticism; he spares no forthrightness after Jay loses his cool and becomes a meaner lover near the film’s conclusion.
All in all, even a misfire from Winterbottom has its moments. It’s a shame they’re couched in what can only feel like filler. The film, listed at 108 minutes, seems at least a half hour longer. There’s only so much scenery we can soak in before we’re on overload, waiting for a character with at least minimal emotional depth to emerge. In Buddhist lore “Trisha” stand for the second noble truth, that of thirst and craving, which cause suffering. Here Trishna’s thirst and craving are barely seen, and even rarer, felt.

2.5 noble truths (out of 5)

The amazing thing about Canadian actress Sarah Polley’s sophomore film, Take This Waltz, is we identify with its main character, a terrific Michelle Williams, when we could just as easily have been repulsed by her.

“Life has a gap in it… You don’t go crazy trying to fill it, like some lunatic,” says Williams’ sister-in-law, Sarah Silverman. Silverman’s advice falls on deaf ears. Williams faces the plight of a contented gone complacent marriage threatened with the emergence of a third party. Though she’s careful and deliberate at first, Williams breaks stride with cookbook author Seth Rogen despite their cooing babytalk and comfortable insults produced from years of trustworthy, easy camaraderie. In the end, Williams’ faith in the contented marriage and subsequent intoxicating infatuation achieve a parity that flattens into a similar unfulfillment. The moral sure seems to be to change yourself from within before looking outside yourself.

Inventiveness here outweighs artifice, but not by a whole lot. On the one hand, a nonverbal funhouse ride scene screeches with meaning and resonance. On the other, a taken aback Williams, upon meeting her new beau, a rickshaw-bearing free spirit, Luke Kirby, announces she’s “afraid of being afraid.” A surprisingly expressive Rogen, upon learning of Williams’ extracurricular stuff, is given an uninterrupted, solo, jump-cut focus. Later, an is-it-real/or-is-it fantasy elongated sex scene includes group sex that doesn’t add up, exposition-wise. It seems self-indulgent. Fresh on the heels of her excellent first film, Away from Her, Polley here ups the ante in the risk-taking department. Though not all pays off, it’s refreshing to see a young director break such ground. Her ability to bring to life the little things that occur in relationships is astounding.

Now to Williams. Wendy and Lucy. Blue Valentine. My Week With Marilyn. Meek’s Cutoff. Now, Take This Waltz. She’s probably our finest film actress these days, period. And her expressive nuances are the major reason we hang with her character here in all her indecisiveness. Some have questioned use of the throwaway 80s Buggles hit,'”Video KIlled The Radio Star” in the film. It underlines the aforementioned funhouse ride scene and is later reprised. It’s simultaneously about the archaic and the new. Taken in conjunction with a moving scene in which Williams and Silverman shower nude with female members of an older generation, it all makes sense. The older women comment on Silverman’s “gap” statement with, essentially, a shrugging “everything new gets old.” Deal with it, Polley is pleading.

3.5 Everything New Gets Old Blues Riffs (out of 5)

Beasts of the Southern Wild is a strong drink for fans of pure unadulterated cinema. The strength of the human spirit, the irrepressible bond between a father and daughter, and the cycle of life and death itself are the themes of this unforgettable Katrina fable starring the stunning Quvenzayne Wallis. Wallis, all of six years old during the filming, beat out 4000 girls who’d answered flyers announcing the lead role of Hushpuppy. (Still five and displaying the same moxie she does in the film, she lied about her age to qualify, then completely blew away the producers in the audition). Most of the actors, including Wallis, hadn’t previously acted a day in their lives.

The film has no conventional plot and needs none. Its style blends the movie’s many powerful and often colorful elements into a film equivalent of a John Coltrane jazz ensemble. It outdoes the similarly abstract Tree of Life for emotional depth by presenting a more grounded vision of the human condition while somehow capturing both the joie de vivre of the Delta lifestyle with the wring-your-hands desperation of victims of Katrina. We get to know Hushpuppy and her dad, Wink, in a visceral, intimate way. They are real people set against the in-your-face backdrop of the mythopoetic “Bathtub” (a 9th Ward-like downtrodden area), not the impressionistic sketches of Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain in Tree of Life. Yet both films afford us a rare glimpse into the eternal questions.

Can you say Oscar and Quvenzayne in the same breath? She’d be the youngest nominee ever, yet I can’t think of a performance in years that so utterly sideswiped me. Her screen presence seems at times eerily unearthly. Judging from interviews, apparently her uncanny instincts led the director Benh Zeitlin as much as she was led by him. Equally impressive, Dwight Henry (in real life a New Orleans bakery owner) portrays Wink by drawing from his own experience in surviving many hurricanes while raising three kids of his own.

Hushpuppy and Wink fight the elements, their rescuers, and each other while ensconced in a shack on stilts or floating on a vessel made of a truck bed and oil drums. Their community, defiant and self-reliant, strut their resolve through music and merriment as some of them, refusing to relocate despite the impending storm, turn their houses into arks. Hushpuppy, who often speaks to animals in code, calls The Bathtub “the prettiest place on earth.” Quite aside from her efforts at self-preservation, she provides the film’s moral compass as well as its innocent victim. Her focus and bravery are unparalleled.

Winner of the Palm d’or at Cannes and Best Film at Sundance, Beasts of the Southern Wild, shot on Super 16, is a technical marvel from the lush shots from cinematographer Ben Richardson to the rich yet delicate score composed by Dan Romer and Zeitlin. The 29-year-old Zeitlin’s first feature is a one-of-a-kind wonder that will surprise, charm and confound you. It may even, and I don’t say this lightly, make you swell with pride at the power of cinema to transform our self awareness.

5 Hushpuppies (out of 5)