Truth and Reconciliation

“A TRUE ARTIST is someone who is close to the people,” says Hossein Sabzian, whose trial for impersonating the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf is the subject of Abbas Kiarostami’s documentary-cum–neorealist drama Close-Up (1990). This common enough sentiment resonates in Close-Up as a bold thesis for a cinema that is not merely populist but thoroughly and originally democratic.

Newly divorced and, like a quarter of Iranians in 1990, chronically unemployed, Sabzian lives only for cinema. He adopts the identity of his hero, Makhmalbaf, out of a need for self-worth. His victims—the middle-class Ahankhah

Neill Blomkamp, District 9, 2009, still from a color film in 35 mm, 112 minutes.

film August 14, 2009

Alien Nation

SOUTH AFRICAN–BORN DIRECTOR Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) wants badly to be a film of the kind and caliber of Children of Men (2006): a thoughtful, left-leaning treatment of contemporary political issues that doubles as an accessible sci-fi thriller. The movie begins as a mock documentary, complete with talking heads and staged “archival” footage outlining a scenario in which aliens land in Johannesburg, their spaceship having run out of fuel during an escape from a disaster on another planet. The South African government, acting more out of concern for its image than the aliens’ well-being,