Written by Matthew Wilder

LAFF 2008 sported stunner after stunner, but maybe the highlight for me was the revival of Kon Ichikawa's 1983 "The Makioka Sisters." This is a picture I know on the basis of Ichikawa's other work, and by way of Pauline Kael's review of it--a sensorium of fleshly delights that's almost as erotically dizzying as the movie itself. (Kael was the lone big-gun critical champion of this masterpiece--a situation as odd, considering her and its temperament, as Owen Gleiberman coming out with both guns a blazing for a neophyte Hou Hsiao-Hsien in Sri Lanka.) This picture, which seems to combine the wintry elegance and bleak wisdom of Ozu with the big-canvas human comedy of Chekhov's "Three Sisters," has the kind of outsized, novelistic reach that movies don't even attempt today. It was stunning to see the picture in an auditorium filled with very elderly Japanese-American viewers for whom this movie was much more than an aesthetic event; still, find it on Netflix--it surely ranks as one of the strongest pictures of the eighties, and one of the period's most underrated classics.

I was also gratified to see a picture that has lived a long and notorious life through Kael's writing, Robert Kramer's 1975 "Milestones," which played with Kramer's 1970 "Ice." I think "Ice" (which I saw later on dvd) is by far the stronger of the two pictures, but "Milestones" may have the distinction of being the most pungent, accurate-feeling movie ever made about the twilight of the sixties counterculture in America. Generally described as bleak and savage, "Milestones" is in fact an unusually tender glimpse, part documentary and part fiction, of some of the radical left's outliers in the winter of Gerald Ford's America. These are not, largely, suicidal burnouts, however; they are the kind of impacted, downward-looking people you might see in a health-food store in Venice, carrying a baby in a papoose. Robbed of a larger purpose, they turn toward smaller goals--mostly raising a family off the grid and outside the system. What do they do with their vanished dream? This is the question Kramer asks, and while the movie is more of sociological than aesthetic interest, "Milestones" is plangent, haunting--you'll find yourself talking about it days later.

God bless Martin Scorsese and his Film Foundation for one of the kickoff projects of their recent venture with American Express, the restoration and exhibition of classic works of the New American Cinema--that project of intrepid cinema led by Jonas Mekas that gave us the works of Warhol, Jack Smith, Hollis Frampton, and many other Whitmans and Mayakovskys of the 8mm camera. LAFF brought out Mike and George Kuchar, those priceless Jersey boys who have been making zero-budget sumptuous epics since Dwight Eisenhower was in office. If you worked on a Douglas Sirk movie, went to bed after eating two pepperoni pizzas, and dreamed about your Aunt Myrtle and Uncle Fud, the nightmare you'd have would probably look and feel like a Kuchar movie--and LAFF showed three full hours of them, with the Kuchars quacking gossip about the weirdo (non)actors in between reels. For 180 heavenly minutes, the era of "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" ceased and JFK, John Coltrane, Lolita and Edie Sedgwick were alive again, and cutting up in Passaic!

Philippe Gomez's "Captain Ahab" is one of the strongest French films of the last couple years, and so directorially assured that I took it as a device that the first twenty minutes of this riff on the early days of "Moby Dick's" hero were punctuated with huge, groaning sonic thumps...till I realized, of course, that the picture was playing next door to "The Incredible Hulk." (Could a sadder indie-vs.-tentpole metaphor manifest itself literally?) A sort of Gallic "There Will Be Blood" on a beer budget, "Ahab" paints the backstory of the galvanic monomaniac in sharp, cruel, haiku-like vignettes that variously recall Bergman, Malick, Rossellini--the strongest thing I can say about the movie is that the influences it sports are never less than the best. (Incidentally, speaking of top-shelf French work: Claude Chabrol's "A Girl Cut in Two," a seemingly blithe, throwaway black-comic number about a flyweight TV personality torn between two lovers, is one of the strongest movies I've seen this year, and I'll write more about it when IFC opens it in August.)

Not everything at LAFF rang my bell. I respected the sobriety and dignity that the great, underrated Jerry Schatzberg brought to Harold Pinter's screenplay for the 1989 "Reunion," part of LAFF's "Ones That Got Away" series. But the movie, about the teenage friendship between a Jew and a Gentile in 1930 Stuttgart, is a long set-up for an inevitable short sharp shock, and Pinter treats the source material, and his own style, with funereal solemnity. And as for some highly regarded Sundance duds, like "Phoebe in Wonderland" and "Frozen River," the less said the better. But all in all LAFF has programmed extremely strong fare consistently over the last half decade. It seems to have its sponsors in order and even oddball fare played to packed houses. Our local journalistic supporters of adventurous cinema--and I mean the ones who don't work for collider.com--need to raise their trumpets in salute.