Feature by InRO Staff: Our staff is only so big and the year so long that we tend to miss stuff worthy of our attention, whether that be to praise or condemn it. As we did last year, our staff has scanned the past 12 months for select films and albums that escaped the full review treatment, and considers them here.

The first of our two While We Were Sleeping features focuses on the films, from tent-pole animation features we probably ignored because none of us have kids, to divisive foreign language pictures straddling the release date line and causing debate as to what year they should be placed in (I’m looking at you down there, “Silent Light”), to tiny American indies difficult to track down, to studio horror films that made our eyes glaze over at the mere mention of their name. We discriminate against no film here, and our reactions to some just might surprise you. Sam C. Mac 

Silent Light (2009)

Directed by Carlos Reygadas

The opening shot of Carlos Reygadas' “Silent Light” has to rank as one of the most breathtaking in recent memory. Gazing at a dark, starry sky, the camera pans across a million sparkling points of light before settling on what we soon realize is a tree lined horizon—for the next five minutes, we watch one of the most glorious, uninterrupted sunrises ever captured on film. Reygadas imbues his tale of Mexican Mennonites dealing with infidelity and crises of faith with a haunting stillness, channeling Carl Th. Dreyer’s masterpiece “Ordet” in a staggering emulation of one artist by another.  The film is eerily silent, sometimes unnervingly so; not a note of music is heard throughout, perfectly reflecting the quiet despondency of the characters. Reygadas is a director who shows and doesn't tell, allowing the audience to pick up on the nuances of each image and the subtleties of each actors' performance. The result is an immaculately composed masterpiece; "Silent Light" is the stuff of legend, a nearly spiritual experience, from breathtaking opening shot to haunting final frame. Matthew Lucas

Frontier of Dawn (2009)

Directed by Philip Garrel

“Frontier of Dawn,” Philip Garrel’s latest swooning valentine to the Nouvelle Vague, is no “Regular Lovers.” That epic treatise on love and privilege steeped its bohemian romanticism in the ultra-specific, coloring its characters in a very particular shade of nostalgia-tinged earnestness. It was a grand mosaic. This one’s more of a sketch, a tossed-off doodle in the writer-director’s dream journal. And yet those with a taste for either Garrel—the restrained aesthetic gestures of the father or the preening postures of the son—will find plenty to like in its loose-limbed languor. Louis plays a hotshot photographer who falls into a tumultuous affair with a married actress (Laura Smet, giving her pretty boy co-star a run for his tortured fashion model money). When the going gets tough, Louis gets going, leaving his dangerously unstable, budding ingénue girlfriend to her own self-destructive devices. A year and one tragedy later, he’s hooked up with a new hottie (Clémentine Poidatz), a delicate pixie-waif slowly cornering him into a life of cozy domesticity. Yet the specter of The Ex, wildchild yin to the current squeeze’s nice girl yang, still haunts his heart, mind, and bedroom vanity mirror.

Though the love triangle narrative resembles a French “Two Lovers,” “Frontier of Dawn” never works up enough steam to qualify as satisfying melodrama. Garrel’s touch is too light, his actors too coolly detached—we might well be watching an impeccably filmed Levi ad, with big emotion reduced to smoldering, “sexy” affectation. A minor work from a major filmmaker, “Frontier of Dawn” gets by on its writer-director’s keen eye for composition, his ease with talent (including a few folks not related to him), and, most advantageously, his general playfulness. If the film’s string of passive-aggressive skirmishes suggests a clip reel homage to Godard’s bedroom scenes (minus the headier conceits and flares of intense emotion) Garrel blessedly undercuts his doomed romantic torpor with oddball non sequiturs, the funniest being a café-set argument with an anti-Semite that has no rational relation to any other scene in the movie. As for the nutty, third act supernatural bent, it both provides the narrative with a much-needed shot in the arm and gives new dimension to Louis’s careless lothario, an indecisive cad who finds no lasting contentment in either adulterous passion or comfy monogamy. He gets his proper comeuppance, of course, a bit of beyond-the-grave poetic justice. Garrel may lionize his boy’s immaculate good looks, but between the “Tales from the Crypt” coda here and the equally bleak (if tonally different) closing moments of “Regular Lovers,” he sure cuts him no slack and pays him no favors in the last reel. A.A. Dowd

Katyn (2009)

Directed by Andrzej Wajda

In 1940, over 20,000 Polish men were executed by Soviet officials and dumped in burial pits in Katyn Forest. It was only a matter of time before Andrzej Wajda, Poland's great nationalist filmmaker, represented an atrocity that directly or indirectly touched most Poles of a certain generation. Wajda imprints history onto the character of Andrzej (Artur Zmijewski), an officer in the Polish military who disappears, along with countless others, as the Nazi and Soviet armies press on. But he wisely gives more screen time to those left behind. Wives and mothers and sisters (and sometimes fathers and nephews) paint the kind of absence which the disappearances create in families and communities. We see Polish officers interned in freezing barracks, but we mainly see relatives and peripheral characters trying to make their way between cities in a land occupied by hostile armies, trying to erect unauthorized headstones on loved ones' graves, and trying to find out what happened to their kin. The personal stories are woven in with moments of pure history: the reading of actual names of the disappeared in a town square; the use of file footage showing the discovery of the mass graves. But Wajda avoids recreating the maudlin epilogue of "Schindler's List," choosing instead to massage blunt history directly and elegantly into his narrative.

It's harrowing subject matter rendered in monochromatic quiet rather than Spielbergian schmaltz, and though "Katyn" has weaknesses, its strengths prevail. The individual stories are what keep the film honest. Maja Ostaszewska, as Andrzej's wife, communicates the sorrow of an individual rather than a wronged national. Women chafe under the propaganda of the Soviets and find ways to undermine it, but their motives are personal as well as political, so idealism never saturates the screen. In larger terms, the arrest of an auditorium full of academics jars us with beautiful art direction and with the impact such mass killings must have on a culture. And if the film's opening scene feels forced (Poles sandwiched on a bridge between two advancing armies), and if the message risks offending (his compatriots remain divided about the film's degree of ham-handedness), Wajda makes up for it with his gut-wrenching conclusion—an unrelenting series of executions that capture victims' faces as they register their fate. Those executions and the scenes that build up to them make "Katyn" a cathartic experience worth the effort. Ranylt Richildis

Lemon Tree (2009)

Directed by Eran Riklis

In Eran Riklis' "Lemon Tree," a David and Goliath struggle develops on the Israeli West Bank between neighbors: a Palestinian widow and an influential Israeli politician. Salma Zidane (Hiam Abbas) chooses to defend her family's grove of lemon trees after the newly-elected Defense Minister and his wife move in next door and order the trees to be uprooted, claiming them a "threat to security." Salma seeks help from her children to no avail, and after being denied an appeal by the local authorities, she turns to young attorney Ziad Daud (Ali Suliman) to handle her case, taking her rebuke all the way to the Israeli supreme court. Meanwhile, Riklis attempts to humanize the other side of this conflict by taking us inside the house of the Israeli Defense Minister, where his wife begins a rebellion of her own against the militaristic ways of her husband.

"Lemon Tree" received a fair amount of critical support earlier this year, but it suffered poor box office in Riklis' native Israel. This following a comparably strong opening for his previous film, "The Syrian Bride," a failing which Riklis attributes to the perception that his film is in some way pro Palestinian. Instead, the modest strength of "Lemon Tree" is its willingness to divorce itself from a specific political point of view, choosing instead to focus on the struggles of its two female protagonists in parallel. Unfortunately, Riklis' decision to avoid the soap box doesn't make his film any less conventional and predictable. As such, "Lemon Tree" is most interesting as a drama with the capacity to raise Israeli-Palestinian conflict awareness, giving us a glimpse at the complex prejudicial debacle of the region without really digging in too deep. Sam C. Mac

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller

“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” is the ultimate food fight, capitalizing on the universal compulsion to play with your food. However, unlike the average dinner table, in the town of Chewandswallow, young and old alike partake in catching and eating raining bacon and snowing ice cream. But like any good food fight, this computer animated, 3D extravaganza offers short-lived entertainment. Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader), a brilliant but misguided young inventor, has the best intentions but the worst ideas. When his town falls on tough times, he commits himself to liberating everyone from their daily diet of strictly sardines. He designs a hair-brained machine that converts water into food, but it goes haywire, destroys half the town and launches into the sky. The contraption is deemed yet another Flint Lockwood failure until, what do ya’ know, it starts raining cheeseburgers! The town is instantly thrilled and Flint becomes a hero. Gluttony and thoughtlessness prevail as Flint, preoccupied by his newfound fame and beautiful weather girl (Reese Witherspoon), pushes his invention into the red zone of the ‘dangeometer,’ unwittingly unleashing a worldwide food tempest. Based on the much loved (and much more subdued) book by Judi and Ron Barrett, 'Cloudy' takes the premise of the gentle and creative book and goes out of control, much like Flint’s food machine. Studios have a knack for choosing inspiring source material, but they also have the ability to mutate the original into something completely unrecognizable, as is the case here. Mr. T. shines in the supporting role of Earl, the town’s tough-talking softy policeman, but ‘Cloudy’ is otherwise middling entertainment hiding behind whiz-bang 3D technology. Kathie Smith

A Christmas Carol (2009)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

Alongside James Cameron, whose “Avatar” has sparked a critical and geek-chic frenzy this holiday season, Robert Zemeckis has spent much of this decade defining and refining the evolution of 3D and motion capture technologies. “A Christmas Carol” is his newest effort along these lines, following “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf,” and the good news is Zemeckis is quickly maturing his technical craft, delivering an array of eye-popping special effects with a chaser of holiday cheer. Unfortunately, “A Christmas Carol” is all confection and minimal heart; that isn’t to say that the film lacks the magic, humor and action that make for a holiday season box-office success, but rather that Zemeckis stuffs it so full of such superficial and bloated sentiments that it becomes more like a stocking full of coal than of goodies. Prizing his admittedly visually-stunning rendering of the classic Christmas tale, Zemeckis unwisely discounts much of what has made Scrooge’s spiritual reflection a perennial favorite. Supplementing Dickens’ more canonical works of high literature rather than departing from them, “A Christmas Carol” is likewise a study of human nature and the incessantly oppressive forces of society and self-preservation. That Dickens was able to create such an uplifting Christmas fable amidst such grim social commentary is a small miracle that Zemeckis only partially registers. More affecting and poignant moments are smothered by a mugging Jim Carrey, still going for laughs in animated form. Still, as a family film, “A Christmas Carol” mostly delivers, nicely mixing in an eeriness too often absent in more earnest adaptations of this work. But when Jacob Marley delivers such an integral and devastating line as “Mankind was my business,” quickly followed up by a bit of animated slapstick, we too easily realize that the visuals are Zemeckis’ priority, and little else. Luke Gorham

Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)

Directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon

This past year has been a great one for animated movies, but “Monsters vs. Aliens” just isn’t one of them. Surprisingly enough, however, as a piece of children’s entertainment, it’s not half bad; the all-star voice cast is the highlight here, with Renee Zellweger headlining as a woman hit by a meteor on her wedding day and transformed into a giant. Whisked away by government agents, she finds herself kept in a secret government facility with other “monsters,” and soon used to fight off an alien invasion. “Monsters vs. Aliens” is mercifully short, and as such is actually a rather breezy and light entertainment, filled with enough winking sci-fi references (Code Nimoy, anyone?) and celebrity cameos (Stephen Colbert as the President is a highlight) to keep the adults entertained, while the kids enjoy the slapstick humor and 3D sight gags. No great triumph, this, but there are far worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon with the kids. Matthew Lucas

The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

Directed by Robert Schwentke

“Glorified airport fiction,” a friend of mine once called Audrey Niffenegger’s hit novel “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” Funny, 'cause I can think of few easy reads I’d rather be stuck in a long layover with. How many Barnes and Noble bestsellers boast as breathlessly romantic a premise? Henry, a man unstuck in time, unwillingly lurches between his own past and future, and also that of his soul mate, his blushing bride to be, his once and future Claire. It’s a fantastical conceit that Niffenegger mines for deep thematic resonance—true love is the weaving of one’s own timeline through another’s, the synchronization of two separate sets of memories and experiences and emotional wavelengths. ‘Wife’ is a chronologically fractured love story that begged for a similarly elliptical cinematic retelling. (Think the mindscape meditations of Alain Resnais, or Darren Aronofsky’s “The Fountain,” with its echoing refrain of “You pull me through time.”) What it gets instead, in this long-delayed Hollywood interpretation, is the decidedly linear machinations of a four-hankie, supernatural romance.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that as four-hankie, supernatural romances go, this one’s surprisingly affecting. Penned by Bruce Joel Rubin, whose “Ghost” basically set the modern template for these sorts of magical-realist melodramas, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” survives its leap to the big screen, a little worse for wear but wearing it well. Chalk it up to the durability of that impossibly nifty concept—time travel as cosmic matchmaker—but also to the two lead lovers, whose hearts beat out of sync with history’s forward march. Eric Bana makes for a broodier Henry, but he’s also a bit more rounded, less the reader surrogate he was on the page. And Rachel McAdams embodies Claire, his redheaded beloved, with absolutely radiant joy, and a headstrong conviction that Niffenegger only sporadically afforded her. They’ve got chemistry, these two well-matched movie stars, and journeyman director Robert Schwentke (“Flightplan”) lends their tumultuous affair a handsome sheen. Ironically enough, the further this Cliff Notes adaptation veers from its vastly superior source material, the better it fares. This Claire actually questions, however fleetingly, her predestined romance. And the film’s most singular invention—a love triangle between Claire, the Henry who is and the Henry who will be—idealistically (naïvely?) posits that loving a person sometimes means seeing who they’re capable of becoming. Given the choice, I’d still rather kill my connection time with Niffenegger’s narrative. But Schenke’s version would make for a pretty solid in-flight movie. A.A. Dowd

Phoebe in Wonderland (2009)

Directed by Daniel Barnz

Films addressing psychological disorders tend to fundamentally suffer an uphill battle. Extensive scrutiny seems a necessary mandate in these instances, a proactive stance against turning, in some ways, the most fundamentally human characters into superheroes or aliens. The line between science and science fiction tends to blur as directors and screenwriters seek opportunity rather than truth. Thankfully, director-screenwriter Daniel Barnz’s debut, “Phoebe in Wonderland,” sidesteps a majority of the pratfalls and tropes of similar films in this story about a young girl with severe OCD. Focusing on Phoebe’s (Elle Fanning) cathartic entry into the world of theater, this part family drama, part thesis on Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s novel is both imaginative and intimate, focusing on the subtleties and exclusivity of coming of age more than the specifics of her disorder. However, the real appeal of “Phoebe in Wonderland” is Elle Fanning, younger sister to Dakota, who delivers a performance here surpassing anything her sister has done. Exceedingly knowing and soulful, Fanning imbues Phoebe with an out of control frustration encouraged by her wounded core, and while the film sometimes strays toward the pat and predictable, Fanning’s commanding presence and immensely felt performance make an otherwise solid but unexceptional debut something to remember. Luke Gorham

Humpday (2009)

Directed by Lynn Shelton

"Humpday" is the first mumblecore film to generate serious press. New technology births new art forms, and accessible digital video has encouraged filmmakers to go rogue. The reactionary movies of Lynn Shelton and the Duplass brothers aren't innovative per se, but they're wafting fresh air over an indie scene gone stagnant in the States. Mumblecore films are genuinely independent and halfway improvised, stripped of contrivance and lovely in their starkness. They're building a neorealistic oasis in a melodramatic landscape, and with luck they might begin to inform the larger domestic scene. Shelton proves you don't need an army to participate in the world's most collective art form. You barely even need a script. What you need, instead, are game performers and an ear for organic conversation. Realism remains the most difficult of fictions to pull off, but Shelton succeeds because of her sense of relationship, which generates infinite warmth. If it took a provocative premise to get the movement noticed, so be it: Ben (Mark Duplass) and Andrew (Joshua Leonard), college friends who've drifted into separate lifestyles, decide to film themselves having ironic gay sex for "Hump Fest," a festival devoted to amateur porn. The catch? Both men identify as straight, with little bicuriosity and lots of trepidation.

Andrew's been living Kerouac and Ben's gone suburban, but they reconnect instantly, awkwardly and fondly when Andrew shows up on Ben's doorstep full of the forced exuberance of the pretentiously free. Having two straight men play chicken with each other over who's more comfortable with gay sex is Shelton's stroke of paradoxical genius. "Humpday" explores two versions of turn-of-the-century masculinity, and heterosexual guy-on-guy meta-porn is the perfect vehicle to vex the hell out of machismo (and thumb a nose at essentialist thinkers who came to the movie expecting a homophobic bromance). It also compacts the men's anxieties about gender performance and friendship into a thermal core and sets the stage for outstanding parlor vignettes. Shelton's work with the actors is extraordinary; we're in the room with them, off to one side. Alycia Delmore, who plays Ben's wife, is actual – many of us know this person, just as we know Ben or Andrew. Familiarity adds meaning and dimension to everything these characters say, and Shelton needs all three of them in triangle to mine her ideas. "Humpday" is a film for the bourgeois Nammer crowd—a nanny's knowing embrace designed to make us squirm. Ranylt Richildis

Pontypool (2009)

Directed by Bruce McDonald

Bruce McDonald finds a way to cleverly deviate from the tried and true rules of the horror film with “Pontypool.” Although the road less taken results in something close to a brilliant disaster, this brainy thriller offers an interesting ride. Broadcasting from the basement of a church, Grant Mazzy is a grizzled down-on-his-luck shock jock relegated to school closings and weather-related news. When strange reports start to trickle in to the station, however, he and his levelheaded producer Sydney find themselves at the center of a breaking story. With only the aid of ambiguous second-hand information, they walk the fine line between reporting the facts and sensationalizing them. The mystery, shared between the characters and the audience, evolves in the confusion of real time and the claustrophobia of a small room, effortlessly holding our rapt attention. Stephen McHattie, as Mazzy, gives one of the best performances of the year as he convincingly handles the talk radio persona like a seasoned pro, pulling us in with every word. Unfortunately, the riveting first half gives way to zombie theatrics and esoteric silliness, and both plot and performance fall apart. The undead predictably find their way on-screen as does the abstruse explanation for Pontypool’s chaos. Saving the world may not be so easy—the deadly virus, as it turns out, is using the English language as a vehicle for transmission. The heavy-handed allegory is too much too late, and “Pontypool” is unable to carry the compelling metaphor to its obvious full potential. Kathie Smith

Friday the 13th (2009)

Directed by Marcus Nispel

Unlike his needless ‘Texas Chainsaw’ redux, which jettisoned the reptilian, snuff-film dread of Tobe Hooper’s original in favor of sleekly modern gruesomeness, Marcus Nispel’s “Friday the 13th” faithfully evokes the spirit of its much-maligned predecessors. Which is to say, it follows the franchise’s boobs-and-blood template—one of the most primitive and rigidly formulaic in film history—to a razor-sharp, axe-shaped T. Same rowdy bunch of party-animal teens, drinking and smoking and fucking their oblivious way to a grisly demise. Same ominously secluded, summer camp setting. Same alternating cycle of false-alarm, fake-out jolts and sneak-up-behind-you, machete-through-the-brain “real” ones. (Bet if you put the stopwatch to this puppy, you’d see a splatter of syrupy blood every seven minutes, almost to the second.) And same ol’ Jason Vorhees, with his hulking figure, steady gate, trademark hockey mask and puritanical killer’s code. Nispel and producer Michael Bay lend these familiar proceedings a magic hour sheen—never has the filmmaking in a Jason movie been this slickly competent—and while the actors still resemble “good looking kids you might see in a Pepsi commercial,” their chops are more “Dawson’s Creek” credible than skin flick atrocious. The kills remain mostly unimaginative, but have a kind of amusingly mechanical precision. (My favorites were the blade through the floor, the arrow through the neck, and the burning sleeping bag.) I’d call this the best entry in the entire series, but boy would that be the faintest of faint praise. Spit-shine aside, Jason’s ki ki ki, ma ma ma song remains stubbornly (but reliably!) the same. Shit is vaudeville for gore hounds. A.A. Dowd

Ricky (2009)

Directed by Francois Ozon

Fusing a raw magic-realism with an even rawer social drama, Francois Ozon’s “Ricky” is a battle of tones throughout. Flickering to life with a close up, Katie (Alexandra Lamy), a newly single mother, spills her heart out to a social service worker about her unfavorable situation, and Ozon’s film opens with the same intimacy and unassuming presence as something by the Dardennes. However, as Katie's domestic and romantic lives begin to shift and dictate "Ricky's" evolving tone—including the birth of the titular child and complications between Katie and her new boyfriend Paco (Sergi Lopez)—Ozon loses control. As Katie begins to discover just how truly special her newborn son is, Ozon’s gritty social realism gives way to an enchanting modern fairy tale. And while Ozon’s tonal shifts are certainly daring and the strings that connect the two halves of the movie are both present and prescient, the director clearly believes “Ricky” to be a far more in depth exploration of its various themes than it ultimately is. Much of what Ozon has to say and many of the conclusions he offers become shallow as the third act is full of insights and narrative directions that either feel unearned or misappropriated. And while the sincerity and innocent daring of “Ricky” save the film from being a complete failure, the whole thing sadly feels more like a parlor trick than real magic by the time the credits roll. Luke Gorham

Flame & Citron (2009)

Directed by Ole Christian Madsen

Ole Christian Madsen’s “Flame & Citron” is a Danish gem that recounts the extermination of Nazi collaborators at the hands of the Holger Danske resistance group within occupied Copenhagen. Among the group’s devoted nationalists, there is “Flame” (Thure Lindhardt), whose eccentric red hair and chameleon looks are betrayed by his professional cool. The opposite is expected of his partner-in-crime, a bespectacled and neurotic everyman known as “Citron” (Mads Mikkelsen), an unlikely candidate for this line of work. In the name of motherland Denmark, both men take pride in spilling Nazi blood, which eventually comes at the cost of their own morality. Trading swastikas carved in scalps for sequences of impeccably orchestrated gunplay, “Flame & Citron” may not be a revisionist fantasy of Nazi genocide like Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” but Madsen’s vigorously stylized film works within a similar template of mixed and matched cinematic genres. It's a wartime thriller, a gangster homage, a film noir procedural and a Hitchcockian mystery all at once. The fact that this hybridization finds an agreeable balance helps to mute passages of monotony and overshadow thin writing. Kevin Vu

Big Fan (2009)

Directed by Robert Siegel

In his screenplay for Darren Aronofsky’s “The Wrestler,” Rob Siegel offered a surprisingly respectful glimpse into the world of professional wrestling, condescending neither its hulking heroes of the ring nor its faithful enthusiasts. It’s curious, then, that “Big Fan,” the second feature Siegel’s scripted and the first he’s stepped behind the camera to direct, would boast such a flagrant disinterest in what makes true blue football fanatics tick—especially as a blinding passion for the pigskin is ostensibly the focus here. Like “The Wrestler,” which jabbed and pecked at Randy the Ram’s dignity with a bit too much relish, this schematic humiliation drama is kept mostly afloat by a bravely naked lead performance. Doughy stand-up comic Patton Oswalt taps into his obsessive-nerd verbosity—and, pointedly, leaves at the door his acerbic wit—to play Paul, a lonely parking attendant who devotes his every waking thought to the New York Giants. Scripting the “impromptu” rants he calls into sports talk radio and listening to the games on a boombox outside of Giants stadium, Paul is the modern football freak as shiftless, unmotivated man-child—and he hits rock bottom when his favorite player, creeped out by his fawning advances, beats the living shit out of him. Siegal might have used this deeply embarrassing and traumatic occurrence to steer his pathetic protagonist into a crisis of conviction. Instead, Paul just sinks deeper into his obsession, and the film becomes a flyweight gloss on “Taxi Driver.” The writer-director, whose ass-ugly compositions make one long for the Dardenne-aping aesthetic grace of Aronofsky, never even tries to get at the heart and soul of his devoted über-fan. That task lies squarely on the hunched shoulders of Oswalt, who resists at every predictable turn the urge to transform Paul into a lovable loser, or to hunt for laughs in his degrading decline. It’s humanity he affords this misfit. And like a shark smelling blood in the water, Siegal drags him down, down, down. A.A. Dowd

Burma VJ (2009)

Directed by Anders Østergaard

An image may be worth a thousand words, but, in the world of guerilla journalism, a moving image within an oppressed state is worth much more. “Burma VJ” tells the behind-the-scenes story of the men and women who risk their lives for just such an image. In the summer of 2007, a series of peaceful protests against the Burmese military junta culminated in one of the largest public demonstrations in the country’s history and also produced one of the most resolute crack-downs. The symbolic heart of the protests was thousands of Buddhist monks who took to the streets resulting in the media coined moniker “The Saffron Revolution.” However, as revealed in this extraordinary documentary, the only reason this story was able to capture international sympathy was because of the unprecedented video footage smuggled out of the country by a dedicated underground network of amateur journalists. Working for the Democratic Voice of Burma and armed with a small video camera, Joshua, the focus of the film, dangerously skirts arrest and potentially much worse in order to shoot the news as it happens. The riveting hand-held footage breathes authenticity and urgency from the ground level. Just as the brave VJs (video journalists) selflessly forge a trail to lift the veil on a society otherwise closed off from the world, director Anders Østergaard reveals the gripping story behind the momentary news snippet. Even the passive and sometimes clumsy lens of “Burma VJ” can’t restrain the heartbreaking resiliency and candor of this bold film and its indelible subjects. Kathie Smith

Adoration (2009)

Directed by Atom Egoyan

There are two filmmakers at work in “Adoration,” both of them named Atom Egoyan. The first is that chilly poet of the Great White North, who, in mid-90s triumphs like “The Sweet Hereafter,” fractured narrative into heady, seductive scavenger hunts. The second is that self-important blowhard who later adopted the Egoyan moniker, splitting his time between gloomy global “Issue” movies (“Ararat”) and soapy genre claptrap (“Where the Truth Lies.”). For a while, it’s the earlier Atom, firing on all mesmerizing cylinders, who seems to be calling the shots here. A Toronto teen reinvents his parents’ death as a post-9/11 horror story, and the director—severing time and space along lines of memory and fabrication—builds a moody mystery out of this fact/fiction fissure. Buoyed by Mychael Danna’s spooky-mournful violin theme, “Adoration” draws you close, begging you to untangle its tapestry of ancient bad blood and throbbing modern dread. What a glorious tease: this is total New Atom nonsense, a conventional family melodrama bolstered by “incisive” talking points (RE: the Internet as insufficient public forum, the morality of terrorism) and severely muddled in its message. It’s a puzzle that gets less interesting the more it comes together. I wanted to scatter its pieces and get lost in the fog again. That, or just re-watch “Exotica.” A.A. Dowd

La Belle Personne (2009)

Directed by Christophe Honre

Ah, the beautiful people. Those rich, famous, ethereally gorgeous beings who sometimes grace the movie screen with their champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Filmmakers like Woody Allen and Wes Anderson have made some of their best movies about the disintegration of these bright young things in the form of earnest dramas peppered with witty dialogue. Those examinations, which are distinctly American at heart, can only be interesting for so long, though. As an avid fan of melodrama, my new favorite taskmaster of the bourgeois is French filmmaker, Christophe Honore, whose latest film, “La Belle Personne,” is steeped in that classic genre. The beautiful person in question, Junie (Lea Seydoux), is the new girl in school who is almost cursed by her beauty. Everyone, including her male and female friends and teachers, basically falls head over heels for the stoic siren despite her obvious (and righteous) disconnect from the world around her. No matter, though. The pain and loneliness Junie feels is expressed rather poetically by the twitterpaited ladies and gents around her in the form of song. My favorite scene, which is reminiscent of Dorothy Malone’s stunning staircase scene in “Written on the Wind,” involves the lip-synching suicide of one of Junie’s more passionate admirers. The age of melodrama might be long gone, but “La Belle Personne” and the rest of Honore’s films offer contemporary audiences an emotional glimpse into those obsessive feelings without the golden age’s restrictions on gender politics. Sara Freeman

Feature By:
InRO Staff