I highly recommend Sweet Land, an exquisite tale of racial intolerance and unlikely romance beautifully filmed and acted with admirable subtlety and restraint. I haven’t reviewed the film, but I recommend these reviews:

Jenni Simmons (The Curator):

Managing a graceful flashback-within-a-flashback format, grandson Lars recalls a story told to him thirty years before by his grandmother, Inge (Lois Smith), about her life fifty years prior. Upon Inge’s death, Lars wrestles with a decision: to sell her land or save it for family to come? To glean wisdom, he sifts back through her story, which, like all of history, is not a list of facts and figures; it is memories. And in this case, Inge’s – not in black and white or antique sepia, but in full color, appropriate for Inge, a cultured city girl who saw the world through painterly eyes as she fell in love with Lars’ grandfather, Olaf Torvik.

…

This spirit was breathed into Inge by writer/director Ali Selim, who birthed Sweet Land after working on a wearying string of antacid commercials. Enamored by Will Weaver’s short story, “A Gravestone Made of Wheat”, he knew it simply had to be his first film project. Selim befriended the simple characters of a seemingly simpler time, but he learned that making a period piece set in a 1920s Minnesota farming community was no easy task. Fourteen years after his literary epiphany, he finished shooting the film in twenty-four days on a meager $1 million budget. In a true “Americana Indie” spirit, he shot each scene in 35mm instead of digital. But that decision was not intended to be revolutionary. Selim said to Studio Daily, “I just think it’s that kind of story. There are things that should be shot digitally. It’s like, when do you use a pencil and when do you use an oil brush? It’s a decision you make based on the final outcome. It’s not ‘is digital as good as film?’ It just feels different. And this felt more like an oil painting.”

Indeed; the use of 35mm preserves an authentic past and yields the most vibrant hues – the sky so blue and the grass so green that you ache for the intense beauty of it all. The cinematography was inspired not by Selim’s favorite films, but by the American realist painters Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, as well as the clean lines and rich colors of Mark Rothko.

J. Hoberman:

Directing with a light comic touch and a palpable affection for the characters, Selim draws pitch-perfect acting from a large cast (John Heard, Ned Beatty, Alan Cumming, Alex Kingston, and Lois Smith) and achieves breathtaking levels of color and clarity from old-fashioned 35mm, whether focusing on his spirited heroine’s alabaster skin or framing the couple’s tiny farmhouse against an expanse of blue sky and gently swaying grain. The film’s penny-pinching period re-creation convinces so fully that Selim seems to turn back the clock on the regional American indie too. Yet the tale of economic stratification and postwar intolerance is nothing if not timely.

Kenneth Turan:

Think of “Sweet Land” as a gift, the kind of delicate but deeply emotional love story, both sincere and restrained, that, like love itself, is more sought after than found.

Directed by Ali Selim in the Minnesota farmland where its story takes place, “Sweet Land” is a type of American independent we don’t see often enough, a beautifully photographed film (in 35-millimeter no less) that celebrates its regional identity. In addition, it’s sure-footed enough to tread on the borders of sentimentality without falling into that ever-seductive trap.

I haven’t seen or reviewed this film yet.

Here are some reviews I recommend:

Gary Kamiya (Salon):

“Waltz With Bashir” is about Folman’s attempt to recover his lost memory of his experiences as a soldier during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and in particular the Sabra and Shatilla slaughter of Palestinian civilians in two refugee camps. Carried out by Lebanese Christian militiamen, under Israeli protection and with its leaders’ complicity, it was one of the most notorious massacres of the 20th century. “Bashir” is an extraordinary work, whose hallucinatory animated imagery and unflinching moral honesty offer an intense depiction of the horrors of war and its devastating psychic consequences. A dreamlike combination of “Apocalypse Now” and “Maus,” it is at once the idiosyncratic story of one ex-soldier’s attempt to heal his hidden wounds and a damning indictment of the Israeli leaders who enabled the slaughter. In the end, by interviewing other soldiers, talking to a psychiatrist and sharing his anguish with friends, Folman succeeds in putting together a fragmentary picture of the terrible events he witnessed and had blocked out for so long. Whether he himself gains any catharsis from his quest is not clear, for at the very end of the film he abruptly abandons both his personal narrative and his animated technique and simply shows filmed images of the slaughtered Palestinians heaped up like cordwood in the alleys of the camps.

Alissa Wilkinson:

Be warned: Waltz With Bashir is not the kind of cartoon you see for entertainment. It’s heavy and difficult. It lays out the tragedy and horror of war through the lens of one man’s confused experiences. The feature-length animated documentary lives somewhere on the border between dream, reality, and a yellow-hued nightmare, and while it explores the horrors of war, it plunges deeper to feel out the damaged human psyche.

Many Americans—like me—are ignorant of the Lebanon War, the Israeli role, and the specific events surrounding the refugee massacre that followed in the early 1980s. This film not only provides a good historical perspective, but also grapples with the fallout in the lives of those who experienced the war, twenty years afterwards. Waltz With Bashir layers complexity into its subject—the good guys are not wearing white hats—and yet, it pulls no punches on exposing the atrocities, ugliness, and destruction of war. Fingers point in all directions. There’s a clear moral judgment about what is right and wrong, but the people involved don’t necessary fall into easy categories.

Jeffrey says:

I haven’t reviewed this film yet. But I loved it. It’s at #4 in my Favorite Films of 2008 list.

Here are some reviews I recommend:

Victor Morton:

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED has plenty of antecedents — the most obvious and deepest being the first Danish Dogme film, THE CELEBRATION (which I heartily recommend): shot on video, similar hand-held shooting style, similar narrative hook (a family gathering that starts falling apart with a public toast). I’d also mention THE ICE STORM (ditto): enervation in the rich Connecticut suburbs. And the films of Robert Altman (I’ve not seen his A WEDDING, but the overlapping dialog style and naturalistic recording and the gathering of a large crowd is pure Altman anyway). Incredibly though, RACHEL improves on all these: less sensationalistic and cut-and-dried than the Vinterberg; more emotionally involving than the Lee; and better-focused on about three characters than some of Altman’s Big-Cast Movies (as in real life, main characters whom we get to know function as persons, while lesser characters mostly function as Signifiers). There’s even echoes of the greatest-ever “family quarrel” movie, Bergman’s AUTUMN SONATA — in an emotionally-needy child who’s her own worst enemy in some ways, and in an ending (I will be vague) that implies through open-ended wistfulness two things at once: the realization that the emotionally-grueling events we’ve just seen might be repeated, or might never have the chance to be repeated, and it’s hard to say which is more terrifying. Yes, I just compared a Jonathan Demme joint to Ingmar Bergman.

Roger Ebert:

The rules say that critics don’t discuss movies after screenings. After I saw Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married” for the second time, however, a friend asked: “Wouldn’t you love to attend a wedding like that?” In a way, I felt I had. Yes, I began to feel absorbed in the experience. A few movies can do that, can slip you out of your mind and into theirs.

…

When Robert Altman is thanked in the end credits, I imagine it is not only because he was Demme’s friend, but because his instinct for ensemble stories was an example. Demme’s owes much to his editor, Tim Squyres, who also edited Altman’s “Gosford Park,” another film that kept track of everyone at a big house party. That might have been the very reason he was hired.

What is Film Forum? Well, with so many film reviews published, and so little time to read them all, I make a note of any review that I find particularly thoughtful, interesting, or persuasive.

Be sure to check back, as I’ve only just begun to read reviews of these films, and I’ll add more interesting excerpts as I come across them. Feel free to submit more reviews, or even your own, in the comments below.

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