"We immediately became friends because of the holy communion of movies," Cocks says. "I found in him someone who loved movies even more than I did and had seen even more than I had -- and I thought I'd seen a lot."

Scorsese's career-long editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, was similarly impressed when she met the director a few years earlier. She had responded to an ad in the paper for a six-week summer course at NYU, where Scorsese was putting the finishing touches on his first short, "What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?"

Had those four films been released a decade earlier, moviegoers almost surely would have scratched their heads in confusion. What is Bruno exactly (or Borat before it), with its unique mix of scripted material and Candid Camera-style stunts? But the Hollywood aesthetic has changed radically in the 10 years since The Blair Witch Project -- a span that saw the rise of reality television, a boom in theatrical documentary attendance and the advent of YouTube -- and audiences are savvier for it.

1. In the Loop
This mockumentary-style political satire from British comedy savant Armando Iannucci brings the fast-talking BBC Four series The Thick of It inside the Beltway, as bellicose “don’t ever call me fucking English” party enforcer Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, playing the full-body equivalent of a throbbing neck vein) preys on the ego and incompetence of his fellow lawmakers to spin both nations into declaring war on an unnamed country. Applying the unfussy fly-on-the-wall approach of The Office to a screenplay that would’ve made Paddy Chayefsky proud, Iannucci intends merely to update Yes Minister for the Iraq era, but in the way that only comedy can, manages to tap into something deeper. As profound as it is profane, the whirlwind of witty barbs and bureaucratic nonsense demands to be seen twice as it poses the terrifying question, What if the principles of showbiz (where nobody knows anything) governed government?

I was floored. What were these films? Of the 61 winners to date (counting the eight pics honored before the category was officially introduced in 1956), I'd seen maybe 15. There were landmark films by the likes of Fellini (a four-time winner), Bergman (three), Kurosawa (two) and Truffaut (one), whose titles I knew, yet never managed to see. And what about such unfamiliar and enigmatic-sounding winners as "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" (1970) and "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" (1980)?

Surely this was a sign. I vowed to track down and watch every Oscar foreign-language winner (no easy feat, as many are unavailable on DVD). My project began in earnest the first week of 2009 with Vittorio De Sica's "Shoe-Shine" (1947) and proceeded in more or less chronological order at a pace of roughly a film a week for the entire year, culminating Dec. 1 with a special Academy-facilitated screening of that most elusive title, 1982's "Volver a empezar."

Both the cult-canonized MacManus brothers and director Troy Duffy were just getting started when vigilante tale The Boondock Saints debuted a decade ago. But fate (in the form of the Columbine shootings) and ego (if behind-the-scenes expose Overnight is to be believed) intervened, sending the movie to DVD heaven and Duffy to director jail. Now, he picks up the original's open ending in The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, which feels larger in scope yet sorely lacking in originality, not unlike the 10-years-on reunion special it is. The audience is there, yet the limited release suggests a homevid strategy.

Continue reading "Boondock Saints" at Variety.com

Anyone looking to kick off a teen fantasy franchise can draw several valuable lessons from the failure of Universal's Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, the first (and likely the last) cinematic adaptation of the popular Brit neck-biter series. First, if you're counting on a property's built-in fan base, don't stray too far from the source. Second, make sure the opening entry stands alone; there's no point wasting energy to set up sequels that'll never happen. Finally, like brother Chris (The Golden Compass), director Paul Weitz seems better suited to comedy than to big-budget make-believe.

Continue reading "Cirque du Freak" at Variety.com

Napoleon Dynamite seems perfectly well-adjusted (not to mention downright charismatic) compared to homeschooled mama's boy Benjamin Purvis in Gentlemen Broncos, the latest oddball character portrait from one-trick helmer Jared Hess. This time, the misfit in question is an aspiring science-fiction writer easily upstaged by his idol, a pompous (but published) fantasy author, played by "Flight of the Conchords" star Jemaine Clement like the cosmic love child of Tim Curry and Orson Welles. Pic tickled its target demo at Fantastic Fest, though it's hard to imagine Fox Searchlight reaching enough geeks in theaters to come anywhere near Nacho Libre's $80 million.

Continue reading "Gentlemen Broncos" at Variety.com

Call it the best '80s babysitter-in-peril movie never made. The House of the Devil delivers about as much as one could reasonably hope from the not-quite-alone-in-the-house category, with the bonus of authentically re-creating the low-budget look and feel of that era's classic horror entries. Still, talk about setting your sights low, as the pic seems content to polish a subpar subgenre. Nevertheless, auds seeking a stripped-down retro spine-tingler that builds to an intense climax will appreciate what director Ti West has accomplished, with strong on-demand interest for the Magnet title leading up to its Oct. 30 theatrical release.

Continue reading "The House of the Devil" at Variety.com

What has 12 legs, three heads and a single digestive tract? The disagreeable creation at the center of Tom Six's The Human Centipede: First Sequence, a beyond-twisted body horror experiment in which a mad surgeon, renowned for separating Siamese twins, kidnaps and conjoins three unlucky tourists mouth-to-anus for no reason other than to satisfy his own sadistic whims (and the morbid curiosity of a certain type of moviegoer). Only real payoff is seeing the monstrosity assembled, and though that will surely earn the Dutch writer-director a cult reputation on the genre circuit, "going there" does not a movie make.

Tut tut, it looks like a hit for Sony Pictures Animation. Eye-popping and mouth-watering in one, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs spins a 30-page children's book into a 90-minute all-you-can-laugh buffet, expanding the premise of a town where it rains ketchup and hot dogs to disaster-movie proportions. With drooling tongues in cheek, tyro helmers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (whose only previous directing credit was cult MTV toon Clone High) bring a fresh, irreverent sensibility to bigscreen computer animation, using 3D projection to maximize their sky-is-falling scenario. This box office and concession-stand draw should make exhibitors very happy.

Continue reading "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" at Variety.com

But as luck would have it, the release coincides with a traveling Oshima retrospective organized by James Quandt of the Cinematheque Ontario, which helps put the film in context. And a good thing, too, because In the Realm of the Senses is an extreme case — the story of an amour fou between a hotel owner and one of his maids that builds to strangulation, S&M and the most personal of keepsakes (perhaps the only art film capable of challenging Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist in the genital-mutilation department) — and I’d hate to imagine going through life thinking all of Oshima’s films were like that.

Top 10 of 2008

1. Wall-E
There are some who refer to “the Pixar formula” as if consistency of quality were a bad thing. The way I see it, Wall-E raises the bar for not just animation but movies in general. From the beginning, the studio rejected singing forest creatures and fairy-tale source material, always looking for new ways to tell stories. This time, director Andrew Stanton creates a staggering photoreal future — a planet overrun with trash — and finds both a love story (Pixar’s first) and hope for humanity in the rubble. The movie’s unassuming lead character, a rusty trash-compacting robot with eyes and arms and no other immediately relatable features, evokes the pure animation magic of Luxo Jr., the expressive lamp featured in the company’s logo. That we invest so much emotion in that little fella merely proves the extent of their talents. When Buzz Lightyear said, “To infinity and beyond,” this is no doubt the kind of constant innovation his creators had in mind.

Everybody knows wrestling is fake, but those are real professionals throwing Mickey Rourke around the ring and real staples piercing skin in one particularly grisly fight.

Thrust into the Oscar spotlight after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Fest, The Wrestler features one of those exceptional, born-to-play roles by Rourke, relying just as heavily on the former heartthrob's background in boxing as it does on the off-screen mileage he has endured en route to this comeback.

In 1993, coming off Unforgiven's Oscar win, Clint Eastwood made a little movie called A Perfect World in which he played a lawman who dreams of apprehending a kidnapper without firing a single shot — a far cry from the director's trigger-happy Dirty Harry days.

But that perfect world, Eastwood would probably be the first to tell you, simply doesn't exist (as was the unfortunate case in the titular film). Where Eastwood lives, laws have their limits, rules are seldom adequate and justice tends to be subjective. But the notion that forgiveness, for the first time in his career, wasn't entirely out of the question marked a significant change for Eastwood (just think how different Million Dollar Baby might be if his character spent the rest of the movie getting even).