Melissa Leo gives a pitch perfect performance in Frozen River (Sony Pictures Classics)

It's rare to be able to write about two movies in one week that are directed by women but this week affords me the opportunity with Courtney Hunt's Frozen River and Céline Sciamma's Water Lilies both opening at Landmark, and both are feature film directing debuts. Frozen River is set near a little-known border crossing on the Mohawk reservation between New York State and Quebec. It's just before Christmas and Ray (Melissa Leo) is struggling with the sudden disappearance of her gambler husband and the family savings. Ray meets Lila (the implacable Misty Upham), a Mohawk woman, by chance and strikes up a prickly partnership with her. Lila lures Ray into the quick money of human smuggling. The film is at its best with the two women. Leo, who's done well in supporting parts (most notably 21 Grams and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada), shines in this starring role as a women whose desperation prompts her to take risks. Leo's Ray is tired and worn but still driven by a survivor's strength. The plot takes some contrived turns and none of the other characters are developed with the depth and honesty of the two main women but it's a promising debut for Hunt. Listen to our Film Club of the Air discussion about the film.

Companion viewing: 21 Grams, The Threee Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Powwow Highway

The 1985 poster for The Breakfast Club and the initial poster designed for American Teen (Paramount Vantage)

The new documentary American Teen (opening August 8 at select theaters) is something of a real life Breakfast Club (you remember that John Hughes film about "a brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel, and a recluse..."). American Teen focuses on five teens representing such school cliques as jocks, geeks, and the popular set. I spoke with director Nanette Burstein about capturing contemporary teen life for her film. You can listen to my radio feature or read the extended interview.

We all remember that iconic and epic film The Breakfast Club. Either you were born watching it or your parents got you into it or even the latest fad of being retro required you to have a large knowledge of whether you were a princess, a brain, a criminal, etc. So when you walked down the theatre aisle and saw this new movie poster for the latest documentary directed by Nanette Burstein, American Teen, you probably had to take a second look, to make sure that it isn't a remake. This documentary has been compared to the most famous 80s movie, but this film is most definitely not a remake. This movie, being a documentary, takes a world that has been displayed in fiction, and in over-dramatic television "reality" shows, and it offers a more in depth and sincere look at the lives of the modern high school teen. The film includes the cliques, struggling to graduate, and teen heartbreak. Overall this film is a great model of what preteens have to look forward to, what teenagers have to live through, and what adults have successfully survived. After I had seen this film I had the great opportunity of meeting and interviewing the director, Nanette Burstein. In the way she spoke of her subjects, I saw the love she had for them and it assured me that this director only had the truest intentions in what that life is like, and I was grateful that this woman chose to deliver this message.

-- Candace Kavanagh just graduated from Mount Miguel High School. She spends her life absorbing celluloid images. She loves every type of film from so-called "chick flicks" such as My Fair Lady and Legally Blonde, to mind bending thrillers like Mulholland Drive and Hard Candy -- with every zombie movie, action flick, musical, and comedy in between.

Serial killer or funny guy? Baghead (Sony Pictures Classics)

When Mark and Jay Duplass were shooting their first indie film The Puffy Chair, they had to make long drives back and forth from the set late at night through the woods. On one of those dark nights the discussion turned to what's scary.

Mark Duplass recalls, "Somebody piped up from the back of the van, ‘I think if you are sitting in your living room and you look out the window and a dude with a bag on his head is looking back at you that would be pretty terrifying.' Everybody started laughing but that night everybody was totally freaked out. The next morning that sensation that it's really funny and its kind of creepy too got us inspired to try and make some kind of horror comedy hybrid that had the most low-fi, stupidest villain ever." And so Baghead (opening August 1 at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas) was born.

;

Tuya's Marriage (Music Box Films)

Last February mainland Chinese director Wang Quanan won the Berlin Film Festival's top honor, the Golden Bear, for his latest film Tuya's Marriage (opened July 11 at Landmark's Ken Cinema). Set in Inner Mongolia, the film focuses on hardworking woman who tries to provide for her two children and crippled husband. After winning the award, Wang said, "A very beautiful dream has become reality for me here. Perhaps this is the last glance at the herds people of the region. Ultimately they are going to disappear into the cities. I think that it is important, particularly in this time when the economy is booming, to ponder and reflect on what we're losing." And this tough, lovely film will be disappearing fast as well, its run ends July.

Drugs for therapy... The Wackness (Sony Pictures Classics)

It's 1994, and Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is spending his summer before college listening to hip-hop and selling drugs from an ice cream cart in New York City. His shrink, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), lets him trade dope for therapy, but Luke's more interested in the doc's sexy step-daughter than any psychobabble. Writer-director Jonathan Levine serves up a funny, sharp, and ultimately compassionate coming of age tale with his sophomore feature The Wackness (opening July 11 at Landmark's Hillcrest Cinemas). Liste to the KPBS Film Club of the Air Discussion of The Wackness.

Father and daughter reunion as Asia Argento stars in her father's Mother of Tears (Myriad Pictures)

I fell in love with Dario Argento when I was17 I saw Suspiria. It scared the crap out of me and sent my friend running for the exit. None of his films since then have been able to duplicate the impressive jolt - like riding a rollercoaster and feeling like the tracks have suddenly disappeared and you're free falling - of seeing Suspiria for the first time. But I have found something to enjoy in each of his films. Now using the word "enjoy" to describe a Dario Argento "spaghetti horror" film is likely to offend some people who find his films excessively gory and sadistic. But Argento is a horror master who's made an art out of terrifying audiences. Suspiria, made in 1977, was the first of what would turn out to be a long gestating supernatural trilogy he called the Three Mothers. The second film was Inferno (1980), set in New York, and this year he delivers the finale, Mother of Tears (opening June 27 at Landmark's Ken Cinema), set in Rome. (You can listen to the KPBS Film Club for our discussion of the film.)

A Childhood Interned (MACSD)

Media Arts Center San Diego (MACSD), which also sponsors the San Diego Latino Film Festival, will present a pair of premiere screenings of their latest project, San Diego Stories Digital Story Station. The free screenings will take place Monday, June 23, at 6:00 p.m. in the Chula Vista Public Library (365 F St., Chula Vista, 91910) and then Saturday, June 28th at 4:30 p.m. at Escondido Public Library (239 S. Kalmia, Escondido, 92025). Both screenings celebrate a variety of short digital stories that have been produced by residents from Escondido, Chula Vista, and throughout San Diego County. The diverse works cover such subjects as Japanese Internment during World War II; stories of Love and Forgiveness; the History of Escondido's Grape Day Festival; the history of the Native American community in San Diego; stories of immigration; the history of the Chula Vista Nature Center; and many more stories about the people, communities and histories that together create the unique fabric of San Diego County. Following both screenings there will be a public discussion with the community storytellers and MACSD artists who worked on and produced the Digital Stories.

San Diego Stories is part of the MACSD's Digital Story Station project that gives San Diego County residents an opportunity to highlight something they deeply care about. According to the MACSD: "The aim of the Digital Story Station is to create a growing collection of video stories that can help us all better understand one another and connect our stories to the places we live. There are three Digital Story Stations throughout San Diego County - Chula Vista Public Library, Escondido Public Library and the Downtown Central Public Library. Additionally, MACSD is assisting the California State Library to install Digital Story Stations at libraries across the State of California. By Fall 2008, there will be 21 Digital Story Stations in California.
San Diego Stories is made possible with support from the San Diego Foundation. Additional support for the Digital Story Station is provided by City of San Diego Public Library, the San Diego Commission for Arts & Culture, KPBS, Chula Vista Public Library, Escondido Public Library, and the California State Library."

MACSD is one of the busiest arts organization in town and it continually reaches out to youth and underserved communities to find storytellers and to provide the means for those people to get their stories out in the community. This latest project should provide some compelling works. Plus it's free. You can't beat that. I hope you will come out and support these San Diego Stories.

For more information call 619-280-1938 x101 or go to the MACSD website.

The documentary The Rape of Europa looks at recovering art tresures from the Nazis. (Menemsha Films)

The Rape of Europa (opening June 20 at Landmark's La Jolla Village Theaters) is a documentary about World War II. Now before you start rolling your eyes and thinking that between PBS and the History Channel you know all you need to know about WWII, let me just say that this documentary serves up something that's genuinely fresh. The Rape of Europa, which played a couple years back at the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, offers something of a detective tale as it seeks to tell the story of the great art treasures that vanished during the war and then turned up years later. The impact of what Hitler and the Nazis did during the war still resonates today as more works of art resurface, heirs sue for restitution, and ownership is disputed. The case of Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer serves as bookends to the documentary with one of Adele's relatives seeking to regain possession of the famous portrait that once hung in the family home. (Although the film doesn't point out that the relative, after winning back the painting, quickly sold it for $100 million, but that raises a whole other issue about art.)

The new documentary Up the Yangtze considers China's Three Gorges Dam project. (Zeitgeist)

The new documentary Up the Yangtze (opening June 20 at Landmark's Ken Cinema) begins with a few words from Confucius about the three ways one can learn wisdom. The first way is by reflection, which is richest; the second is by imitation, which is easiest; and the third is by experience, which is bitterest. The wisdom of China's decision to go ahead with its Three Gorges Dam - the biggest hydroelectric dam in history and some say a project headed for eco-disaster -- is at the heart of Up the Yangtze. But Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang doesn't come at his subject from the obvious angle of environmental lecturing. Instead, he serves up a personal narrative that focuses on the very human cost of building the dam and flooding the equivalent of the Grand Canyon. (You can also listen to the KPBS Film discussion of teh film.)