Lying

• LYING (DVD MOVIE)

BROWN BUNNY - DVD MovieAfter its scandalous screening at the 2004 Cannes film festival, Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny was cut from 118 to 92 minutes, and that made all the difference. The film that critic and long-time Cannes attendee Roger Ebert originally called "the worst film in the history of the festival" was transformed, by Gallo's judicious editing, into a perfectly acceptable if not universally respected art-house curio, widely criticized yet ripe for cult status, able to stand beside Gallo's Buffalo 66 as the work of a genuine artist with a singular vision. Yes, that vision is self-indulgent, narcissistic, and likely to turn off a majority of viewers with its glacial pace and endless shots of Gallo driving, driving, and driving some more. But in portraying a melancholy motorcycle racer who drives cross-country while mourning a private loss that rema! ins secret until the final scenes, Gallo gives us a character, and a film, that feels spiritually akin to such early '70s classics as Five Easy Pieces and Two-Lane Blacktop. It's a flawed yet ultimately moving example of maverick, unconventional cinema, and while Chloe Sevigny's explicit oral sex scene with Gallo is completely unnecessary, it's just one more element that places The Brown Bunny firmly, and refreshingly, out of the mainstream. --Jeff ShannonThe most fearless film yet by France's idiosyncratic Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep) is an unholy marriage of ruthless corporate thriller and sinister science fiction. Connie Nielsen is the American "ice princess" in a French multination, an ambitious executive whose betrayals and invasive tactics would make her a villain in any other film. Here she's just a pawn in a shadowy conspiracy that may involve contemptuous new assistant Chloe Sevigny and fellow dealmaker Charles Berling and takes her! from the legal (if unsavory) commerce of Japanese Internet po! rn to th e brutal market of underground pornography. Assayas directs his modern corporate nightmare with a voyeuristic style, a hard eye for disturbing images, and more passion than explanation. It isn't his most audience-friendly film, but his portrait of international commerce and image culture in the 21st century is impassioned and haunting--cinema for viewers hungry for ambitious and provocative filmmaking. --Sean AxmakerWhen a long weekend brings four women together in the countryside, each of them is forced to navigate the depths of social interaction as virtual strangers. How well do we really know the friends we make in adulthood? And in an age of lies, what can be made of the person who tells untruths so small they serve no obvious purpose?