The Pool is only the second feature from prize-winning filmmaker Smith, who gained an enthusiastic cult following for his 1999 documentary American Movie. Appearing at first be a complete departure for Smith, The Pool tells the fictional story of 18-year-old Venkatesh, who just barely earns a living cleaning out hotel rooms and selling plastic bags in the city of Goa, India. When he meets the upper-class family who owns the glimmering swimming pool where he longs to dive, Venkatesh sees the possibility to escape from his tough existence.

Though filmed almost entirely in Goa in English and Hindi, Milwaukee based Smith makes the story his own through another tale about an outsider seeking to better himself and explore a world beyond his experience. It’s primarily this quality that Venkatesh shares with would be horror maestro Mark Borchardt of American Movie. Inspired by the great neorealist works of cinema, Smith has delivered a genuinely heartwarming and humanistic film that never strikes a false note.

Consider Pere Portabella’s Warsaw Bridge such a film. This wonderfully mad lost masterpiece was originally made in 1990, but never secured any distribution in the US, and is now being presented in a brand-new 35mm print on February 6 & 8. Catalan director Portabella, who usually makes about one film a decade, was once a producer for Luis Buñuel. His films have an absurdist quality similar to Buñuel’s, but Portabella keeps his work apart by exploring his own obsessions and a certain tradition of European culture. In May 2008, Dryden audiences had a chance to see his most recent film, The Silence Before Bach, which offered up a number of enchanting episodes, all unrelated except for their individual celebration of J.S. Bach’s music.

Warsaw Bridge is ostensibly the story of a romantic triangle between a novelist, a conductor, and a marine-biology professor, but
Portabella’s film is actually a love letter to the possibilities of cinema, filled with non sequiturs and nonsense. The filmmaker has assembled a series of bizarre images and surreal sequences that play out like a beautiful dream: an unusual concert in a shopping arcade; a verbal chess match; an opera performed at a fish market; credits that appear 30 minutes into the film; and much more. Unlike any other movie ever made, Warsaw Bridge isn’t just something to watch. It provides an experience to savor and feel.

Fincher’s feature debut Alien³ (screening on January 7) brought his own anti-technological vision to the successful horror-sci-fi series starring Sigourney Weaver by setting the action on a primitive penal colony planet. His second film, the detective procedural/horror film Se7en (January 14), earned Fincher the admiration of movie lovers around the world. The story of two cops (Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman) on the trail of a possibly omnipotent serial killer, Se7en’s impact is best felt in the cinema, where Fincher’s terrifying, yet dazzling visuals truly cast a spell.

Fincher reunites with Brad Pitt, teamed with Edward Norton, in the audacious, violent, and very funny anti-consumerist satire Fight Club (January 21). On January 28, the Dryden will present the first area theatrical showing of Zodiac: The Director’s Cut, Fincher’s masterful and existential serial killer epic/newspaper drama, which will be shown in a slightly longer version than the initial release cut and in its original high-definition digital format.

These words, written by Raymond Chandler and spoken by Dick Powell as Chandler’s immortal fictional private detective Philip Marlowe, are from Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely, later adapted into the 1944 film noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk. The quote also perfectly encapsulates the basic nature of noir: an un-relentingly dark and mysterious world, populated by heroes who, often fatally, embrace the darkness by entering a life of crime or taking up with the wrong kind of woman. Because the cast-against-type Powell and his co-stars Claire Trevor and Mike Mazurki are so good, and the shadowy black-and-white imagery is so strong, Murder, My Sweet has become an iconic emblem of film noir and has been selected to open our second season of the genre’s essentials on January 8.

Murder, My Sweet’s potency is largely responsible for the common misconception that many noirs are private detective stories, when actually very few are. Frequently, noir protagonists are jobless drifters who sometimes keep their dark motivations hidden, like the character played by Robert Montgomery in Ride the Pink Horse (screening on January 15). Other times they’re transients who don’t know what they’re looking for and decide to look for trouble like Dennis O’Keefe’s ex-con in Raw Deal (screening on a double bill with T-Men on January 22); or Orson Welles’s Irish wanderer in the series closer The Lady from Shanghai (February 26). Just as often, noir heroes are sturdy career types whose once steady lives fall apart such as the family man played by Powell in Pitfall (screening on a double bill with Nightfall on February 12) and Fred MacMurray’s insurance agent in Double Indemnity (February 19); or they’re not-so-stable men with jobs, like the borderline psychopathic screenwriter embodied by Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place (February 5).

Typically, the noir hero’s downfall comes at the hands of a femme fatale, and what a batch of dangerous dames in these classics: Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Wanda Hendrix, Gloria Grahame, Anne Bancroft, Lizabeth Scott, Barbara Stanwyck, Rita Hayworth. The great Ida Lupino gets her own double feature on January 29: first as the leading lady caught between Cornel Wilde and sicko Richard Widmark in Road House; then the pioneering Lupino steps behind the camera as director in the suspenseful indie gem The Hitch-Hiker. Join Philip Marlowe and the rest of his shady comrades as we plunge into the murky waters of essential film noir every Thursday in January and February in the Dryden Theatre.

(Kelly Reichardt, US 2008, 80 min.)

In an acclaimed performance, Michelle Williams stars as Wendy, a wandering young woman who, on her way to work at a fish cannery in Alaska, winds up broke with a busted car in the Pacific Northwest and only the company of her beloved dog, Lucy. Caught shoplifting to pay for Lucy’s food, Wendy is released only to find Lucy has disappeared. Setting out on a quest to find her pet, Wendy encounters an unusual assortment of characters—some helpful, some cruel—along the way. As in her previous feature Old Joy, director Kelly Reichardt reveals a delicate and nuanced style, delivering one of the most heartbreakingly touching yet unsentimental movies in recent memory.

(Kelly Reichardt, US 2008, 80 min.)

In an acclaimed performance, Michelle Williams stars as Wendy, a wandering young woman who, on her way to work at a fish cannery in Alaska, winds up broke with a busted car in the Pacific Northwest and only the company of her beloved dog, Lucy. Caught shoplifting to pay for Lucy’s food, Wendy is released only to find Lucy has disappeared. Setting out on a quest to find her pet, Wendy encounters an unusual assortment of characters—some helpful, some cruel—along the way. As in her previous feature Old Joy, director Kelly Reichardt reveals a delicate and nuanced style, delivering one of the most heartbreakingly touching yet unsentimental movies in recent memory.

(Kelly Reichardt, US 2008, 80 min.)

In an acclaimed performance, Michelle Williams stars as Wendy, a wandering young woman who, on her way to work at a fish cannery in Alaska, winds up broke with a busted car in the Pacific Northwest and only the company of her beloved dog, Lucy. Caught shoplifting to pay for Lucy’s food, Wendy is released only to find Lucy has disappeared. Setting out on a quest to find her pet, Wendy encounters an unusual assortment of characters—some helpful, some cruel—along the way. As in her previous feature Old Joy, director Kelly Reichardt reveals a delicate and nuanced style, delivering one of the most heartbreakingly touching yet unsentimental movies in recent memory.