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Review Originally published on August 21, 2009.

I.m often surprised by a film that doesn.t look very good once I see it and realize it.s better than I had imagined. On the other hand, some films have the opposite effect, luring me in and then disappointing me on some level. The Country Teacher isn.t bad, but it did sort of effect me on this level, ultimately leaving me with an underwhelming aftertaste that overpowers the film.s promising start.

Written and directed by Bohdan Slama, The Country Teacher (Venkovsky ucitel) tells the story of an over-qualified school teacher (Pavel Liska) who leaves a classy prep school job in Prague for a position teaching children in a small rural school. Upon his very arrival, the principal of the school himself is telling him that he won.t last and that the students are uninterested and hopeless. Despite the negative introduction,...

I’m often surprised by a film that doesn’t look very good once I see it and realize it’s better than I had imagined. On the other hand, some films have the opposite effect, luring me in and then disappointing me on some level. The Country Teacher isn’t bad, but it did sort of effect me on this level, ultimately leaving me with an underwhelming aftertaste that overpowers the film’s promising start.

Written and directed by Bohdan Slama, The Country Teacher (Venkovsky ucitel) tells the story of an over-qualified school teacher (Pavel Liska) who leaves a classy prep school job in Prague for a position teaching children in a small rural school. Upon his very arrival, the principal of the school himself is telling him that he won’t last and that the students are uninterested and hopeless. Despite the negative introduction, The Teacher (whom goes...

If you're a fan of road movies, then you better call in sick with a case of swine flu, as this weeks sees a lot of them arriving in theaters. For everyone else, there are docs on art and music, some European sunshine and a little smattering of domestic darkness.

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"24 City"

Festival favorite Jia Zhang-ke ("Still Life") delivers a portrait of a culture in flux and a meditation on the ethereal nature of history with yet another of his patented hybrids of documentary aesthetic and name actors. Once a virtually self-contained community with its own accommodations and amenities, the massive 50-year-old munitions factory in Chengdu is undergoing demolition to make way for high-rise apartments. Through the testimony of former inhabitants both real and fictional, Jia offers a take on the growing pains of...

Having examined the American fright features populating the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival’s Midnight collection, it’s high time to look at a pair of European genre movies playing the event. One of them is actually part of the Spotlight section instead, as Lunacy's Czech writer/director Jan Svankmajer, at age 71, now qualifies as a Grand Old Man of oddball cinema as opposed to the young turks populating the Midnight realm. And despite its title, Lunacy may be the least “mad” of Svankmajer’s features, committing (pardon the pun) to a straightforward story interspersed with the filmmaker’s traditional surreal stop-motion animation. In an onscreen introduction, the filmmaker describes his latest work as “a horror film, with all the degeneracy of the genre,” and is interrupted by a fleshy animated tongue skittering past his feet. That’s a sign of things to come, as the stop-motion isn’t nearly as...