Jordan Beswick, C.S.A.

by Michael Koresky (May 23, 2007)

Even during the heyday of the American paranoia thriller, there was never a performance quite like the one given by Michael Shannon in William Friedkin’s take-no-prisoners adaptation of Tracy Letts’s off-Broadway play about fear and loathing in an Oklahoma motel room. As Peter Evans, the blandly named, seemingly innocuous drifter who appears one evening at the doorstep of Agnes White (Ashley Judd), a battered wife terrified of her ex-con husband’s return, Shannon has either officially arrived onscreen or carved out a memorable cult niche. It was a sly move on Friedkin’s part to have Shannon reprise his stage role; largely unknown to movie audiences, Shannon makes for a persuasive blank slate, an unknown entity. The plot trajectory of “Bug,” though originating from Agnes’s point of view, relies upon the slow peeling away at Peter’s psychosis, and it functions best when you don’t know where it, or Peter, or Shannon, is going. Eyes set so widely apart he looks like a praying mantis, the actor moves gradually and unrelentingly from possible savior to frenetic phantasm; and as he strips himself down, he achieves something like grace - his performance feels like an authentic inner howl, a splattering of soul, at once unwieldy and intimidatingly in control.

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by indieWIRE (May 14, 2007)

Picking up over seven years after “Henry Fool”, Hal Hartley brings us his version of the sequel. In “Fay Grim” Parker Posey again plays Fay, struggling with her son who is turning out to be much like his arrogant father Henry, missing now for seven years. When she’s sent by the CIA to Paris to get her husband’s belongings, she’s thrust into international espionage as she begins to uncover the truth about Henry. To Hartley fans everywhere, new work from the indie film maven is something to celebrate. Toronto Film Festival programmer Noah Cowan wrote: “Hartley’s films trade on rhythm and this requires an enormous command of tone by both actors and director. ‘Fay Grim’ is a perfect example of how a film can be dramatically elevated by a wildly successful collaboration in this area…” “Fay Grim” opens May 19th from Magnolia Pictures.

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by Jeff Reichert (May 14, 2007) [An indieWIRE Review from Reverse Shot.]

Like Gaspar Noe with a colder, reptilian eye, or a brutalist Robert Bresson, Bruno Dumont cut a divide through contemporary cinematic circles with his first three features. That this swath is tiny and both his detractors and supporters fall largely within that camp we could label “serious cinephiles” is a shame (”Twentynine Palms” may be the best psychological thriller in recent memory), but understandable: Dumont’s is a singularly unpleasant body of work. But don’t think for a second that unpleasantness precludes magnificence. A critic once wrote of his own inability to climb onboard with (and therefore show much interest in) Dumont’s vision of a blank, empty humanity most often caught painfully rutting and rutted in an existence generally not far removed from the average wild beast. To each his own, but to allow a certain kind of species-bound egoism to deny a priori the validity of Dumont’s query, the idea that perhaps we’re not so far removed in aspect from the beast we eat for dinner or watch on “Planet Earth,” seems a touch naive, or at the very least close-minded. And whether you agree with this taciturn French filmmaker about humankind’s prospects as a species or not, the extreme dourness of his narratives undeniably make his rare moments of spiritual uplift all the more earned.

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