Alice Winocur's DISORDER proves a paranoid thriller with excitement, depth and character

The first thing you may notice about DISORDER, the new film from Alice Winocur (shown below, who gave us the unusual Augustin three years back) is its sound design. As we follow a young soldier with PTSD, we're aware of a kind of pulse, beeps and background noise of all sorts, sometimes quite subtle, other times more forceful. I had to stop the disc once, just to be sure the sounds were not coming from somewhere in my apartment. No, they're in the mind and feelings of our protagonist, Vincent, played by Matthias Schoenaerts (of Bullhead, Rust and Bone, A Little Chaos, Far From the Madding Crowd and The Danish Girl), in what may be the best of his many good performances so far.

You could hardly ask for two more disparate movies - in terms of theme, content and genre than Ms Winocur's Augustine and Disorder (the filmmaker, who also co-wrote the screenplay for Mustang, is shown at right), yet she handles both films with an assured hand that gives us what those themes and genres need -- plus something more. Character would seem to be paramount to this filmmaker, and she provides it beautifully in both movies, while also adhering in her latest to some of the important conventions requires by the thriller genre.

That "character" is shown most prominently and importantly via Vincent (Schoenaerts is shown above and below), whose PTSD appears to have made him unable to continue his military service. He wants to, but things don't look promising. A compatriot gets him a security gig with a group who are protecting the home of a wealthy Lebanese businessman. When that businessman is simultaneously called away on emergency business and after Vincent has shown a bit more than mere competence on the job -- or maybe it's simply due to his friend's influence -- he is asked to stay on until the businessman returns to guard his house, his wife and his son.

The entire set-up here is geared for high stakes security, and therefore paranoia, and Ms Winocur very quietly and cleverly allows us to feel all of this without ever being certain whether what we're experiencing is actual danger or merely professional paranoia. Add to this Vincent's own unsettling symptoms, and we're on very shaky ground. For nearly the first half of the film we're kept on our toes and a bit breathless, wondering and waiting for one of those shoes to drop.

When the moment comes for action, the filmmaker proves to be more than up to the task. This scene is absolutely crackerjack -- thrillingly you-are-there -- and its aftermath (why are the authorities behaving in this odd way?) even more so. And Winocur brings everything to completion in a strangely satisfying manner than manages to bring a kind of closure, even as it honors its quest for character with a marvelous combination of strength, precision -- and doubt.

Despite its genre, the movie really has only four important characters, Vincent, the businessman's wife (a fine job by the always glamorous and usually expert Diane Kruger, above), his young son (a good, unfussy and believable job by Zaïd Errougui-Demonsant, below, left), and Paul Hamy as Vincent's friend, Denis (center, two photos below) who, due to all the paranoia surrounding us, we can't help but wonder just how good of a friend he really is.

The filmmaker captures well that initial distance and class difference between employer and employee, and she allows this distance to properly lengthen or shorten, as things take turns for worse and better. For their part Schoenaerts and Kruger do a fine job of making their relationship count, while keeping it as off-balance as is all else around us.

Finally, as it becomes clear that we can no longer trust police, government and who knows who else, we must reply on character.  It is here that Winocur makes her final and finest stand. Disorder gives us much of what genre fans will demand, and then a little more. I think you will remember it oddly and fondly -- right up until its final moment, which you will discuss and perhaps argue over.

From IFC Films and running a nicely-paced and just long-enough 98 minutes, Disorder opens in New York City this coming Friday, August 12, at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and IFC Center -- while simultaneously becoming available via VOD. We're told that a nationwide, limited-release rollout will follow.

BUZZARD's memorable oddities: character, movie, and filmmaker/actor, Joel Potrykus

If you caught indie filmmaker Joel Potrykus' earlier film, Ape, and saw its lead performance from actor Joshua Burge, you're one up on TrustMovies. I came to the new film, BUZZARD, as a virgin to the work of Mr. Potrykus and so was promptly blown-away by the bizarre Mr. Burge and the film in which he takes center stage. What a face this guy has! Every bit as strange and memorable as that of Julian Richings (from last week's oddity, Ejecta), Burge's is younger and a tad more handsome (in a strange way), and the actor uses his face very well, passing from loony to nasty, vulnerable to empty and finally into something quite frigh-tening. And yet this actor manages to hold us and make us somehow care.

Burge is helped considerably by the filmmaking skills -- mini-budget as they may be -- of Mr. Potrykus, shown at right. The writer/ director sticks his camera in Burge's fluid face and captures those features, large and handsome-grotesque, in their constant and amazing mobility. Burge plays Marty Jackitansky (he's White Russian, rather than Polish) a slacker/scam artist who works as a temp at some kind of bank, where his co-worker and friend (were this guy capable of actu-ally having a friend), Derek (shown at bottom and played by the filmmaker himself) have fun and do very little work. Marty's scams, minor and funny as they initially seem, grow larger and more dangerous as the movie unfolds. As does our non-hero, as well.

Yes, Marty is an anti-social asshole, but he is also a medically-challenged, problemed person, with whom we ever so gingerly begin to empathize. This empathy, which actor Burge allows us to feel despite his character's huge flaws, is what makes the movie more than mere caricature or deadpan humor. Burge, shown above and below, lets us enter the mind and soul of Marty and, hellish place that this is, also allows us to engage with him.

Along the way, we see our guy taken advantage of by an even-more-powerful scammer, and then hightail it off to Detroit, where he stays in a posh hotel and eats spaghetti and meatballs (above) and get into even more trouble. The threat of violence hangs over Buzzard from the very first scene (involving an odd glove). And though this violence does come to fruition, it is both worse and better than we might have imagined.

There's a school-boy duel between Freddy Krueger and a Star Wars laser, and some back-story hints dropped now and again. But to Potrykus' great credit, he has turned Buzzard into a fine character study of a sad but fascinatingly marginal figure -- and in the process given his star a creepily star-making role to play.

The movie -- from Oscilloscope and running 97 minutes -- debuts tomorrow, March 4, at BAM in Brooklyn, and then opens theatrically this Friday, March 6, at 13 cities across the country, and further, too, in the weeks to come. (In NYC, it plays the Film Society of Lincoln Center; in L.A., Laemmle's Noho 7.) To see all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters, click here and scroll down.

Erik Skjoldbjærg's PIONEER proves a would-be paranoid thriller that ends up dead in the water

The unreliable narrator has a deserved place in the history of cinema. But when everything he's surrounded by -- story, script, direction, performance -- seems equally unreliable, the viewer is in trouble. So it is with PIONEER, the new film from Erik Skjoldbjærg, the Norwegian director who earlier gave us Insomnia (the original) and Prozac Nation, two other films with unreliable narrators. In Pioneer, however, the subject is the 1980s Norwegian oil boom due to the discovery of the dark and greasy substance under the North Sea, America's rather odd and little-known involvement in this, and maybe murder-made-to-look-accidental in order to sway control over the project from a small Scandinavian country to that of a rather large super-power.

Director Skjoldbjærg -- shown here, who also co-wrote the film, along with a quartet of other screenwriters -- offers up a tale rife with weirdness right off the bat, as we see a pair of deep-sea-diving brothers, assured but competitive, jockey for position in both life and work. The latter involves diving for the joint American/ Norwegian project team, led by Stephen Lang, in which a surly American diver (Wes Bentley, below, left) makes his presence felt, along with one of those brothers (André Eriksen, below, right).

Bad things happen almost immediately, and a cover-up appears to have begun. At least that is the opinion of the other brother, the actual star of the film, Aksel Hennie (below), the Norwegian actor who was so good in the lead role in Headhunters, and has pretty much made a career out of playing jumpy, bizarre, sometimes violence-prone characters (from his early Uno to the recent Hercules, in which he played, and very well, the crazy "hero" Tydeus.

Mr. Hennie begins the movie a little "off" and continues growing even farther afield until everyone and everything around him seems ready to pounce. This makes for some thrills and oddities but mostly it guarantees confusion and finally out-and-out silliness.

Really,  who among intelligent, thoughtful folk would not by now imagine American the Beautiful capable of some of the worst atrocities and hypocrisy currently going? So it is no big step to suppose us as the villains here. Mr. Lang (above) can be impressively nasty, as can Mr. Bentley, whom the screenwriters have seen fit not to give a shred of real character besides his nastiness. Why waste an actor like this in such a dismal role?

So we get chases, and break-ins, and murder, and betrayal, and near-death, and much else. To no avail. The plotting jerks from arbitrary to nonsensical and back again. If the villains here really wanted to succeed, our would-be hero wouldn't stand a prayer. Instead, they miss their opportunities (or for some dumb reason refuse to take them to their logical conclusion) time after time after time.

Eventually, you'll shrug your shoulders, crunch down in your seat to nod off or maybe visit the refreshment stand for something to keep you awake. There are rumors afoot that an American remake of this film is planned. Unless it turns out one hell of a lot better than this one, you've got to ask, why? (That's Mexican actress Stephanie Sigman, below, playing one of the several characterless women who also dot the movie.)

From Magnolia Pictures, in English and Norwegian with English subtitles, and running a long 111 minutes, Pioneer opens this coming Friday, in New York City at the Cinema Village, in Los Angeles at the Landmark NuArt, and then in Florida, San Francisco and San Diego in the weeks to come. (You can view all currently scheduled playdates, with cities and theaters, by clicking here.) 

Netflix streaming--SNOWMAN'S LAND is Tomasz Thomson's black comedy in a white landscape

As dry as the ice that sticks to your fingers and won't let go (and just as funny in its bleak sort of way), SNOWMAN'S LAND is one of those crime comedies in which the laughs catch in your throat because they're so dark. Yet the movie is very amusing in its pitch black way. That it mostly takes place amidst a ravishing white ground upon which the snow makes all look pristine only adds to its bizarre allure. Beginning with a "hit"--in which the wrong man is killed, due the assassin's having a slightly off day--the movie grows icier from there.

Just past the outset, our "hero" Walter (Jürgen Rißmann, above) is told, after his blunder, to take a winter vacation that will double as help for an out-of-town crime boss named Berger.

As he approaches Berger's "headquarters," Walter runs into an old acquaintance, Micky (Tomas Wodianka, above) -- also a hit man, no surprise -- and the two head off to learn what their assignment is to be.

Once they arrive, Berger is nowhere to be found, only his girlfriend Sibylle (Eva-Katrin Hermann, above), who treats the pair like shit and then leaves for a party. What transpires from here grows crazier and darker but never loses touch with the reality the movie so nicely creates. By the time Berger (Reiner Schöne, below) finally shows up, anything is now possible, and that's pretty much what occurs.

Written and directed by Tomasz Thomson (shown at right: This is only his second film) the movie is surprisingly assured both visually and in terms of dialog and pacing. Herr Thomson keeps the surprise, suspense and smiles flowing, and he does this all within the confines of a nearly single-location setting and a mere quintet of actors (the fifth wheel, Berger's right-hand man, is played quite well by Waléra Kanischtscheff, below, right).

The director seems to perfectly understand the power of "quiet" in a crime movie, as opposed to all those explosions and chases that Hollywood favors in film after tiresome film. He also knows how to use narration judiciously and cleverly to keep that smile on our often bewildered (but never bored) faces.

As a microcosm of how we live these days, Snowman's Land -- in German with English subtitles -- might seem a tad far-fetched. But think about it a moment or two and its paranoia can creepily sink in. The movie is available now via Netflix streaming and probably elsewhere, too.