AFI Fest, a free film festival put on by the American Film Institute, featured premieres of big movies like The Gambler, American Sniper, Selma and A Most Violent Year, as well as gala presentations of The Homesman, Foxcatcher and Inherent Vice. They also presented a program of film discoveries and festival favorites.
In between the big galas and full reviews, I put my film festival cap back on and went on the hunt for some quality cinema. I’ve recapped my discoveries in the slideshow below, in alphabetical order. There were some real breakthrough films, a few catchups from SXSW and TIFF, and a couple WTFs that you’d probably only see at a film festival.
Check Out: AFI Fest Review: ‘Inherent Vice’ – Gravitas and Blow
AFI Fest 2014 Recap:
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
AFI Fest 2014 Recap
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Breathe
Breathe is a heartbreaking portrayal of the vulnerability to which we expose ourselves in close friendships. Charlie (Josephine Japy) befriends the new girl at school Sarah (Lou de Laage). What begins as a touching friendship gradually gives Sarah the power to hurt Charlie. Co-written for the screen and directed by Melanie Laurent, Breathe is entirely relatable. When I think about the stupid things I fought with my friends about in school, they seem petty compared to Sarah and Charlie. But then the point is they always feel important at the time. Getting that close to someone makes us vulnerable, and at a time when we’re not mature enough to handle that responsibility. Granted, Charlie hurts Sarah too but it escalates to a powerful dramatic climax, elegantly directed and I think we’re ultimately on Charlie’s side. But maybe it’s ambiguous enough that we could debate that.
RATING: 8 out of 10
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Eden
Eden is well shot, a little bit looser with the script, and not my world at all but I can appreciate the heart in it. Writer/director Mia Hansen-Love said it was a love letter to her brother, who is a DJ. For starters, I’m not into DJ music and clubs, but luckily Eden isn’t Nn Ts Nn Ts Nn Ts Nn Ts: The Movie. It is a period piece about a DJ (Felix de Givry) struggling to support himself in Paris and New York from the ‘90s to now. The broad strokes of loves and losses, and making ends meet, are all there but not in a traditional narrative. Fans of the scene are sure to love the details and impressionistic quality, but it can be a challenge to witness seemingly aimless scenes cobbled together. The lack of a real throughline may make it more lifelike, but less cinematic.
RATING: 5.5 out of 10
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Faults
Faults begins with a scene so funny it coasts for quite a while on that. Dr. Ansel Roth (Leland Orser) is an author and public speaker about cult deprogramming, but he is so pathetic that you couldn’t trust him to take out the trash let alone to fix your loved one’s mind. He does something in the opening scene I’ve never seen before and it’s brilliant. Then the plot kicks in as he’s hired to deprogram Claire (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). The idea of a cult deprogramming comedy is bizarre enough to work on its own merits, and the cast certainly sells it. Winstead is so powerful, it actually makes Ansel more sympathetic because he’s no match for her. Faults is a comedy that exposes the pain and failure that makes things funny in the first place. If I interview the cast of Faults I will have to call the article The Stars In Our Faults.
RATING: 6 out of 10
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From What Is Before
When I heard there was a five and a half hour Filipino movie playing at AFI Fest, I accepted the challenge. From What is Before is pretty good, but I could have shaved 10-15 minutes off it, easy. Set in a Pilipinas village in the ‘70s, there is actually a two hour story in From What is Before, with a three and a half hour prequel tacked on. We watch villagers walk across fields and canoe down rivers in real time essentially. A girl suffers from the throes of a disease, a priest tries to lead his people, and a traveling saleswoman goes hut to hut. Around hour four, Marcos’s army takes over and those characters become our cyphers for the occupation. Really, we could have gotten that without the hours of buildup, but some people have to be artists, man.
RATING: 5 out of 10
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Reality
Reality bites. Yeah, they kinda gift wrapped that one for us. Quentin Dupieux made my favorite movie of 2011, the meta deconstruction Rubber. His follow-up, Wrong, was clever too. Reality is an ambitious take on blurring the lines of narrative, but the elements themselves aren’t entertaining enough to make the payoffs worthwhile. Without spoiling, a cooking show host (Jon Heder), a cameraman (Alain Chabat) who wants to direct, a producer (Jonathan Lambert), a grade school principal (Eric Wareheim), a therapist (Elodie Bouchez) and a little girl named Reality (Kyla Kenedy) find their realities intersecting and overlapping. Dupieux even hits on some fascinating ideas about how movies exist in our mind and levels of reality that would give Christopher Nolan a headache. But the subplots themselves are just too mundane and boring to keep us going until the third act.
RATING: 5 out of 10
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Self Made
Self-Made was the movie I wasn’t even scheduled to see, but I got out of another movie early and just made it in, and I’m so glad I did. It’s like an Israeli Terry Gilliam movie, in tone if not in production design. We follow two women, an Israeli artist (Sarah Adler) and a Palestinian worker (Samira araya) in the Etaca factory, an Ikea-like furniture manufacturer. The artist faces an overwhelming amount of mundane demands: an interview, computer problems, a delivery, incoherent Skype conversations and an anniversary surprise. The Palestinian has a more volatile life crossing an armed road block to work, but the two women’s lives intersect in several ways and oddly fit together. No one else notices the absurd connections and just go on about their lives. It’s certainly saying something about divisive lines, but it’s a wonderful surreal fantasy on its own.
RATING: 8 out of 10
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Still Alice
As I sat through Still Alice, I was hoping Julianne Moore would stand up and yell, “I’m still Alice, motherfuckers!” The point of the title is that whatever memories she loses, she is still Alice, so might as well be emphatic. Moore plays a 50-year-old woman suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s. The film has a sense of humor and compassion for both Alice and her family, although going full MF would have addressed one of my concerns with the film. No matter how compassionate or well-meaning Alice’s husband (Alec Baldwin) or children (Kristen Stewart, Kate Bosworth and Hunter Parrish) are, they can come across as condescending. Of course, in real life nobody knows the right way to handle losing a loved one this way, but in the screenplay, and perhaps the book on which it is based, they could use a stern talking to. Moore conveys Alice’s gradual decline all the way to the tragic end, but the film never contextualizes it as anything more than a movie of the week.
RATING: 6 out of 10
