The New Rijksmuseum
Directed by Oeke Hoogendijk

“A process in which no one wants to take a risk is too Dutch for me,” says architect Antonio Cruz of Cruz y Ortiz, the firm in charge of designing the renovation of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. He says this in late 2005, just two years into what will wind up being a 10-year project to renovate the beloved museum, one threatened by risk-averse politicians, greedy contractors, short-sighted curators and a tyrannical cyclists’ association. “I spend more time on cyclists than on Rembrandt,” whines Wim Pijbes, the museum’s new director-general. “It’s my fate.” Director Hoogendijk tracks the project through pitched disputes, captivating artworks and vivid characters in this surprisingly gripping two-part, four-hour documentary.

The personalities involved are what make The New Rijksmuseum so engrossing. There’s the quirky and ponderous caretaker Leo van Gerven, the dreamy Asian art curator Menno Fitski, the sage outgoing director-general Ronald de Leeuw, and the stoic director of collections Taco Dibbits (real name!). More than serving as talking heads in some rudimentary museum documentary, they’re given the time and attention to become full-fledged characters with dynamic subplots. “This building is just as important to me as a wife would be,” van Gerven says, his devotion to the temporarily vacant museum seeming at once sweet and melancholy. When his office of 10 years is demolished right before the reopening, his sadness is unmistakable.

By giving so much life to the curators, administrators, staffers, activists, politicians and architects who figure into this sprawling drama—not to mention the beautifully photographed building itself—Hoogendijk has created something that feels nothing like a conventional documentary. With startlingly clear storytelling she constructs a narrative of maddening bureaucratic conflict and administrative indecision set off by the hopes and dreams of the Rijksmuseum’s staff and designers. At times the project’s overly decorous showdowns and interminably delayed gratification evoke an HBO drama or a Victorian novel. An even more apt point of comparison is the Rijksmseum’s star attraction, Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” an enormous and arresting painting whose many richly detailed figures transmit vivid inner lives filled with clashing and complimentary histories, dreams and disappointments.

Opens December 18

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
Directed by Amei Wallach

The Kabakovs are not your typical artist couple. First of all, they’re related: during a family-history excursion in Russia, we visit the courtyard that was once shared by Ilya Kabakov’s father and Emilia Kabakov’s grandmother, who were either cousins or siblings; it’s unclear. Secondly, their collaborative process is very starkly split: Ilya creates or conceives of all the artworks—massive installations drawn from Soviet life telling the playful and affectionate stories of fictional but semi-autobiographical characters—while Emilia acts as a kind of agent, assistant and spokesperson. Also, and this helps to elevate Enter Here beyond the artist-documentary niche, as Soviet-born American immigrants they have extremely personal and illuminating perspectives on Russian society and culture. Despite some muddled passages early on, Wallach manages to gather her subjects’ many facets into a cohesive narrative about conflicted nostalgia and the enduring neuroses of having grown up in the USSR.

The budding artist-documentary auteur—whose only previous credit is her invaluable 2008 Louise Bourgeois doc—seems at first to take on too much. The film’s narrative focus is the Kabakovs’s first major retrospective in Russia, which in 2008 launched art czarina Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Center. As we follow preparations at their Long Island home-studio and in Russia, Wallach recaps Ilya’s career as an official artist and children’s book illustrator by day and elite member of the Moscow avant-garde at night, plus most of Soviet art history between 1917 and the late-1980s. That’s a lot to tackle, and a couple of tangents seem extraneous, but the Kabakovs eventually articulate and turn out to embody many of the peculiar conflicts and contradictions of contemporary Russian identity. The couple is endearing and very forthcoming, but their relationship lacks the tension that made films like Cutie and the Boxer or Eames: The Architect & The Painter so rich.

Meanwhile, Enter Here’s portrayal of modern-day Russia may be its greatest shortcoming. Filmed and edited before the Pussy Riot trial and the country’s passage of anti-gay legislation, Wallach’s Russia isn’t quite neutral, but seems conspicuously unproblematic. “It’s changing and it’s still the same,” Zhukova muses in the film’s most skeptical statement about post-Soviet Russia. “I guess it’ll always
be like that.”

Opens November 13 at Film Forum

Camille Claudel 1915
Directed by Bruno Dumont

The most haunting features of French sculptor Camille Claudel’s works are always the eyes, which uncannily convey a rich inner life. Juliette Binoche achieves a similar effect here in her portrayal of the artist during the second year of a three-decade institutionalization that would last until her death. In long, silent takes and a few monologues inspired by Claudel’s correspondence with her brother Paul (Jean-Luc Vincent)—who kept her institutionalized but remained virtually her only contact with the outside world—Binoche makes plain the maddening dread of wasted talent, stolen freedom and lost years.

Bruno Dumont’s pared-down direction and screenplay, and Guillaume Deffontaines’s spartan cinematography, amplify Binoche’s intensity, making this more of a psychological portrait than a period biopic. In this respect it couldn’t be more different from Camille Claudel, 1988’s Isabelle Adjani-Gerard Depardieu melodrama, which focused on younger Claudel’s relationship with her mentor and lover, Auguste Rodin. In fact, if not for the title and occasional allusions to WWI, you could easily forget when Camille Claudel 1915 is set. The nun-staffed institution in rural France looks practically medieval, but its deeply engrained sexism and condescension are creepily modern. The austere conditions and supporting cast of weirdly endearing detainees evoke an era before the Industrial Revolution, but then Paul turns up in a motorcar. This disorienting jumble, suggesting disparate places and times, contributes to the film’s purgatorial mood.

In this raw, sparse setting, with its windswept landscape populated by patients whose grimacing faces share the same depth as Claudel’s best portrait busts, Binoche is superb. Quiet and calculating one minute, unhinged and sobbing the next, she expresses brilliantly the maddening frustration of a falsely incarcerated genius. Seeking some modicum of control over her predicament, and plagued by paranoid fears and conspiracy theories, Claudel is permitted to prepare her own meals. But fleeting bursts of creativity, as when she begins drawing in the margins of a letter or manipulates a handful of clay found on a stroll, only serve to extenuate her growing desperation and feelings of powerlessness.

Meanwhile, Dumont refrains from casting Paul as an outright villain or elucidating his motivation for locking up his sister, though his culpability is never in doubt. In two monologue-driven scenes that are the film’s weakest, Vincent plays Paul as alternately aloof and conniving, feigning piety and concern but clearly eager to keep his sister imprisoned. Otherwise, Camille Claudel 1915 foregoes family drama to focus on and conjure all-too-effectively the crazy-making daily slog of being the only sane person in a mental institution. Knowing that Claudel would die in that same facility 28 years later makes Binoche’s performance, with its sporadic flashes of hope and optimism for a return to normalcy, all the more powerful and gut-wrenching.

Opens October 16

Cutie and the Boxer
Directed by Zachary Heizerling

This movie’s about many things—art, family, the American dream—but, as its title suggests, it’s primarily about a relationship: the marriage between DUMBO-based artist couple Noriko and Ushio Shinohara. Introduced to us on the morning of Ushio’s 80th birthday, he and his wife trade a series of stinging jabs that come off as weirdly affectionate. “You are so pitiful,” she chuckles. “Don’t get mugged on your way home,” he calls as she leaves his studio, before confiding to the camera, “The average one has to support the genius.” He clearly considers himself the genius, though his career has taken a nosedive since his gnarly cardboard sculptures and post-Pollock action paintings—made by punching long canvases with paint-soaked gloves—fell out of favor. Now his few hard-earned sales support them both.

Ushio’s work is übermacho to the point of verging on satire, while Noriko’s is very feminine. Director Heizerling animates her precise, comic-like paintings—a semi-autobiographical series titled “Cutie and the Bullie”—to tell the couple’s history, splicing in home videos and vintage news profiles of Ushio. Their son, also an artist, is most conspicuous by his awkward near-absence, an apparent casualty of his parents’ careers. Their dingy and cluttered loft is a far richer character, externalizing decades of literal and symbolic baggage. Reclining in lawn chairs on their Jay Street rooftop as trains rumble over the glowing Manhattan Bridge, Noriko and Ushio resemble a bohemian update of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.”

Heizerling conveys the tensions between Noriko and Ushio very economically while emphasizing their interdependence. When they’re not arguing or pausing for a moment of unexpected affection, they’re in their studios: he banging away at his canvases and bolting together giant cardboard motorcycles; she carefully painting the next passage in her revenge fantasy. Likening the pair to flowers sharing a pot, Noriko explains that when things are bad—as they seem at the film’s start—they are dire, but when their fortunes improve, they both thrive.

The beautifully shot and sensitively edited documentary builds toward a heightened moment of shared triumph. Noriko is far more candid and comes across as more genuine, which can give the impression that she is Cutie and the Boxer’s hero. But the intellectual, emotional and aesthetic bout the film portrays suggests she and Ushio are pushing—rather than punching—each other.

Opens August 16

Fast & Furious 6
Directed by Justin Lin

Twelve years and five sequels in, the Fast & Furious franchise has finally grown up. In Part Six, new dad Brian (Paul Walker) and new uncle Dom (Vin Diesel) are recruited by former foe Agent Hobbs (The Rock) to chase down the Londonian cyber-terrorist Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), who has enlisted Dom’s presumed-dead former flame Letty (Michelle Rodriguez). If they prevail, Dom, Brian and company will receive full pardons for the crimes perpetrated in Fast & Furious 1-5. This episode of the outlaw-loving series, with its uncharacteristically government-backed mission, adds family values and pro-torture patriotism to the foregoing installments’ core curriculum of objectifying women while sexualizing cars. It also gets baroque in its narrative intricacies—at least by car-chase movie standards.

With a convoy of nearly a dozen central characters from every previous installment, F&F6‘s many non-chase scenes fall somewhere between soap-opera sentimentalism and Victorian-novel complexity. Self-referential histrionics and shop-talk schmaltz abound. Former frenemies exchange slaps and a few punches, plus what pass for witticisms in this grease-monkey melodrama. Roman (Tyrese Gibson): “You’ve gotta get her a big rock, or you’d better be big somewhere else, if you know what I mean.” Han (Sung Kang): “So that’s why all your girlfriends wear so much bling.” But the movie’s overriding and oft-articulated message is that safeguarding country and family justifies any kind of violence.

And justify it does, after each admittedly gripping chase sequence, from London to the Spanish countryside. The vehicular cast, too, is practically Dickensian, the typical roster of American muscle cars, imported roadsters, and souped-up motorcycles joined by a supporting set of auction-bought vintage coupes, custom-built racecars, a tank, and one very large airplane. Director Lin keeps all the fast-moving parts staggered, with various subplots and tangents gliding off and then looping back to the main action like an expertly engineered freeway. Its expanding repertoire of reprehensible ideologies may be shameful, but for a blockbuster vehicle designed to extract premium action from every gallon, F&F6 is far more fuel-efficient than any of the guzzlers it speeds toward chassis-crunching crashes.

Opens May 24

Herman’s House
Directed by Angad Sing Bhalla

“It’s probably the best move I made in my life,” Herman Wallace, who has spent all but eight months of the last 40 years in solitary confinement at America’s largest maximum security prison, says of his ongoing collaboration with artist Jackie Sumell. In 2002 she asked him what his dream house would look like, and the resulting fantasy home spawned wooden and digital models, architectural blueprints, exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world—including Artists Space in New York—and, finally, the project to actually build the thing in New Orleans that takes up the latter section of director Bhalla’s first feature-length doc. Herman’s House is big enough to accommodate countless rich subjects, from prison reform and black radicalism to architectural theory and the nature of artistic collaboration, but its cursory explorations add up to a frustrating if sometimes incredibly engaging film.

Sumell and Wallace’s relationship carries the film, even though the latter is present only as a wise, disembodied voice. Their tense yet affectionate phone conversations ooze with the emotional intensity that great documentaries are built around, which makes it problematic when Bhalla’s focus drfits. An early section involving Wallace’s sister proves very moving, so it’s all the more conspicuous when she disappears from the film. Another aside devoted to a younger, since-released inmate whom Wallace took under his wing may be heartwarming, but it detracts from the film’s momentum. Sumell’s struggles with New Orleans’s city bureaucracy are briefly alluded to, but never explored, and the parallels between her collaboration with Wallace and the feelings of loss and pain bound up in her parents’ house are made very palpable early on and never raised again. With some trimming and more focused storytelling this strong documentary might have been as structurally sound and brutally powerful as the art project that generated it.

Opens April 19