Jerzy's back--and as fine as ever--with a new, unusual slice of happenstance, 11 MINUTES

What a career -- fifty years of it --  Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski (shown below) has had. From his full-length debut movies Walkover and Identification Marks: None, both from 1965, through his latest and one of his most spectacular to reach these shores, opening this Friday in New York -- 11 MINUTES -- the man seldom repeats himself yet keeps entertaining us while very cleverly pushing our filmic boundaries. This new film is no exception. It's quietly enthralling for its initial 70-odd minutes before exploding, literally and figuratively, into one of the more wondrous explorations of non-benign serendipity you're likely to have witnessed. This is equally eye- and mouth-opening cinema.

Skolimowski is the man responsible for a movie that so many of us love and yet would probably forget to place on our best lists: Deep End. For me, 11 Minutes is right up there with that unusual film. But it is so very different in style, if not theme. This filmmaker has one of the darker sensibilities in modern cinema, and I do not mean something like the cheapjack variety that a Tarantino exhibits. The Skolimowki version is bone deep, I think, perhaps due to his having grown up under Communist rule in Eastern Europe. And it is not that the man is resolutely negative. His films are usually full of life and fascinating behavior, but the overall vision is of a world that will come to naught. And he makes us feel the loss.

The plot here is rather... not there. Instead we have maybe a half-dozen different stories involving characters who are clearly inhabiting the same town at the same time. But their lives are quite separate.

Were not Skolimowski such an intelligent and clever writer/director, we might lose interest in these people as the film progresses, Instead we stick with them because their stories, even if disconnected, are clearly important (to them, and the filmmaker makes them important to us, too).

There's a hopeful young actress (Paulina Chapko) and the clearly sleazy director (Richard Dormer) with whom she has an audition (three photos above); her over jealous boyfriend (Wojciech Mecwaldowski) two photos above; and an ex-felon hot dog vendor (Andrzej Chyra, just above) who really knows his dogs, both canine and edible varieties).

A drugged-up drug courier (Dawid Ogrodnik, above) who takes a little extra time delivering sex ,as well; an elderly artist composing outdoors; a young man about to take up stealing; and a young woman, suddenly homeless and walking a dog (played by striking newcomer Ifi Ude, below) are among the disparate group.

What makes 11 Minutes so unusual is its structure. What we see in this film is roughly the same eleven minutes but viewed from the perspective of all these different characters. So the film seems to bounce back and forth in time, but because we're seeing things so strangely, we can only just keep up with the proceedings. That is, until, finally, we begin to view various threads assembling. Not all of them, mind you, but enough to keep us on our toes.

The film's distributor is billing its movie as a "thriller," but it's not. Too slow-moving for that genre, it is more of a drama, but one that unspools -- unravels, really -- in quite unpredictable fashion.

Even so, little will prepare you for the finale, in which it all comes together with shock, surprise, sadness and wonder. The cinematography here is extraordinary (via Mikolaj Lebkowski), and once you've picked your jaw up from the floor, you may very well murmur, as did I, "My god -- Skolimowki's done it again."

From Sundance Selects/IFC Films and running just 83 minutes, 11 Minutes will open Friday, April 8, in New York City for its exclusive theatrical premiere engagement at the IFC Center. Elsewhere? I hope so. A film this intelligent and this much fun ought to find wider circulation.

Alonso Ruizpalacios' fluid, energized, gorgeous GÜEROS -- new and special from darkest Mexico

One of the great pleasures of viewing all these small independent, foreign and documentary films is that, sitting yourself down in a Manhattan screening room and awaiting what's about to be shown -- particularly when it's a first full-lengther from a director of whom you've not heard -- you just never know what you're going to get. When what you get is as bracing and original as GÜEROS, the new film directed and co-written (with Gibrán Portela) by Alonso Ruizpalacios, you want to stomp and shout and maybe write a review like the following.

What Señor Ruizpalacios has accomplished is genuinely special, an explosion of utterly crack black-and-white cinematography that brings to life a strange and marvelous, yet in some ways ordinary story melding social issues, politics, coming-of-age, revolution, love and sex -- everything, in fact, that you might expect from a modern-day Mexican movie except kidnapping, torture and murder. (There is one scene that seems to presage some of this, but fortunately we're whisked away to better things.)

I have no idea where or how Ruizpalacios came up with the germ of this idea and then brought it all to fruition. Wherever and however, it has turned out wonderfully well. From the opening that begins with a definition of the title word and then a shot of what looks like maybe some eggs to a rooftop endeavor that goes very wrong to incident after incident that leap and spring and roll over one another until a kind of mosaic of an entire society comes into focus -- this is one hell of a rich, energetic and beautiful experience.

For some of us more jaded reviewers, in fact, Güeros is not unlike discovering movies for the first time. Comparisons have been made to the French New Wave. Believe me, they're apt. Ruizpalacios mixes politics, class, and humanity's striving in a unique way. At times, his film will seem like a kind of not-just-waiting-but-actively-searching for Godot -- and then, yes, actually finding him!

The biggest difference between this film and the 60s New Wave is probably society itself, which has now moved on, in an increasingly fast and furious manner, from life as it was then to the utter craziness of now. (Or at least the Mexican student riots of 1999, during which the film is set.) Movies have kept up with these changes, of course, and occasionally perhaps surpassed them, as I think Ruizpalacios' film is doing. One of the beauties of this movie is how what you initially imagine the film will be about keeps growing, changing and widening its scope into something much richer and more important. Like life itself.

For a long while, the movie appears to be about boys and young men scamming and/or just having fun. Then a musical performer/idol of the boys enters the picture, followed by a politically active girlfriend  -- all of which which takes the film into new and more expansive realms. How the filmmaker ties all this together, while leaving much of it still open-ended, is what makes Güeros the wondrous accomplishment that it finally becomes.

The beautiful, lustrous black-and-white cinematography by Damián García (El Infierno) is a huge asset here, as are the fine performances, real enough to have you sometimes imagine that you're watching a documentary. The well-chosen cast includes a quartet of players, the best-known of whom is the uber-charismatic Tenoch Huerta (above, left, and at bottom, of Deficit, Casi Divas, Get the Gringo and Sin Nombre), who here has perhaps his best role yet as the older brother. Huerta has that kind of James Dean magnetism that captures us by never pushing and, in fact, playing hard-to-get.

Younger brother is played by Sebastián Aguirre (above and on poster, top), who nicely combines the anger of adolescence with the need to learn and grow. He easily carries us -- -and the movie -- via this learning experience. Best friend Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris), though by necessity the character who must fade into the background, fades quite well, while Ilse Salas, below, who has the single major woman's role, connects the movie to both sexuality and politics with enormous energy and spirit.

Constantly pulsating with life and ideas, Güeros might prove to be such an arthouse find, if not an out-and-out crowd-pleaser, that Señor Ruizpalacios may never again come up with anything quite so spectacular. But I'll bet you'll want to be sitting in the theater when his next film appears.

From Kino Lorber, in Spanish with English subtitles and running 106 minutes, the film opens tomorrow, May 20, in New York City at Film Forum. In the weeks and months to come, it will open in Santa Barabara, Montreal, Denver, Houston and Victoria, BC. Click here to see all currently scheduled playdates with cities and theaters listed.

With sad,sweet,funny swan song LIFE OF RILEY we wave good-bye to a French new-waver

Watching Alain Resnais' newest -- and final -- film, LIFE OF RILEY can't help but be a sad experience for those of us who loved the guy's work, even if, for me at least, it took some decades to fully appreciate that work. Memory is one of this fabled French filmmaker's major themes, and I don't think that memory -- for young people, anyway -- has quite the major place in one's life that it occupies in later years. Resnais was also an experimental filmmaker right up until the end. Yet his experiments were always coupled to narrative in a way that, with some extra work, of course, one could begin to fathom meaning, while appreciating the style.

The filmmaker, shown at right, died earlier this year, and it is difficult to watch Life of Riley (Aimer, boire et chanter is the original French title) -- based, as several of his films have been, on the the work of British playwright Alan Ayckbourn -- without imagining that Resnais knew quite well during the filming how little time he had left. I suspect his widow, Sabine Azéma, (pictured below, right), who is also one of the stars of the movie, would know for certain. The rest of us will just have to watch and wonder and enjoy. That last action, for Resnais fans, at least, will not be difficult, for he has given the movie a wonderfully "fake" look that combines gorgeous shots of the countryside and expensive estates with very obvious stage sets, and then occasionally places his actors in close-up against hand-drawn backgrounds that bring to mind comic book art.

Even if you've seen the rest of Resnais' work, you won't have experienced anything quite like this. The story itself is a hoot and a half about death and dying. The title character George Riley has been told by his doctor and friend (Hippolyte Girardot, below, left) that he has little time left to live.

Not only the doctor's wife (Ms Azema) but her best friend (the standout performer, Caroline Sihol, at left, two photos above and just below; with Michel Vuillermoz) are both former flames of Riley and of course are bereft by this news.

As is Riley's most recent love (Sandrine Kiberlain, below, left) who has recently split from George into the arms of a nearby French farmer (André Dussollier, below, right). The women are beside themselves, each desperately needing to see herself as George's one true love, while their men are at sea due to their women's sudden surge of independence and possible infidelity. Oh, and did I mention that some of these characters are simultaneously rehearsing a play which is due to be performed very soon.

Now, this is utter artifice -- on one level as silly as can be -- and I suspect that the original.Ayckbourn play was much funnier that what we see here. Yet out of it, Resnais manages to show up humanity's lack and hypocrisy in a way that is more sad than funny. And the film's final scene, in which we at last see a character other than our ever-present sextet, is most unusual. In it, the daughter of one of the couples, played by Alba Gaïa Kraghede Bellugi, makes an appearance and somehow takes the movie into a deeper, darker contemplation of death's inevitability and finality.

If Life of Riley is nowhere near as interesting or layered a film as Resnai' most recent endeavors, Wild Grass and You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, it is still a film to be seen and savored -- for its performances, style and the fact that, having to work on what seems to have been less and less of a budget, the filmmaker nonetheless found a way to make his film so affordably and stylishly.

M. Resnais' final work -- from Kino Lorber and running 108 minutes -- opens in New York City at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema tomorrow, Friday, October 24. Elsewhere? Shocking as this may seem, no Los Angeles showing is yet scheduled. But the film will play at the Cinema St. Louis as part of the St. Louis International Film Festival on November 20 and 22, and then on December 5, it will play at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (unless, of course, Scott Walker wins his race for Governor once again and closes the school down).