A Sundance debut, Azazel Jacobs’ emotionally naked “Momma’s Man” is a small-scale, modestly budgeted comedy of terrors about Mikey (Matt Boren), a thirtysomething man who visits his New York parents in their artifact-stuffed rent-controlled Chambers Street loft and for unspecified reasons freezes up and finds he can’t return to his wife and child but instead curls up into all kinds of stalling tactics. (Talk about kammerspiel.) As a dry comedy about clinical depression, it’s a wondrous monument, maybe the most terrifying movie I’ve seen all year. It’s also fine tribute to the home and lives of Jacobs’ mother and father, filmmaker Ken Jacobs and artist Flo Jacobs. At first glance oppressive, the scale of its compacted decades of artistic practice slowly blooms into something awe-inspiring. Jacobs shot on 35mm, as he did with his giddy earlier feature, “GoodTimesKid,” which played at Chicago Underground and is scheduled for DVD release by Benten Films. (Ray Pride)
Sharp-Dressed Man: A Review Of Orson Welles' Restored The Trial Josef K. is an office man, an ambitious junior bureaucrat, long and thin as a blade in knife-sharp suits and he is involved in quite the nightmare, finding himself accused of crimes that he has not committed.
Seeing The Elephant: A Review Of Babylon The boisterous, brawling yet melancholy "Babylon," is a variation on film history, but more drawing for drama. It's gaudy and mean, celebratory and sorrowful.
Heart: A Review of Soul The real world is soulful, too, in Pixar's bountiful life of the mind.
