In its depiction of mid-80s Eastern European Communist social hell, Cargo 200 makes 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days look like Sesame Street. There are plenty of films that use real history as the jumping off point for genre fantasy, but Aleksei Balabanov’s brutal, fetid vision of personal sadism and political policy intermingled is the only work of serious, modern social criticism in recent memory that actually made me want to puke. This is a compliment of the highest order.

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Upon its Russian release in 2007, Cargo 200 immediately provoked a national furor. Alexei Balabanov’s grim little movie centers around one Captain Zhurov (Alexei Poluyan), a police officer in 1984’s Soviet Russia who uses his position of authority to essentially institutionalize rape, prisoner beatings and all-round mayhem.  In a typical scene, he tosses the corpse of a girl’s soldier-fiance next to her while she’s chained to a bed and proceeds to read the dead man’s love letters.

When I first saw Cargo 200, I thought it was supposed to be black comedy, but it isn’t; its pitch-perfect production design is part of a whole package designed to check any nostalgia for the departed Soviet era, even if it summons up long-gone discotheques and hairstyles effortlessly. Cargo 200 itself is the code word for the boxes in which dead soldiers are shipped back from Afghanistan, which pretty much sums up the grim tone. Already available through Netflix, Cargo 200 receives a much-deserved if small release January 2; Balabanov’s film is appalling, but it’s also surprisingly elegant.

A few contextual things you may like to know: despite working as an interpreter for two year in the ’80s, Balabanov will only do interviews in Russian, so I spoke with him over the phone in that language. Balabanov is not what you might consider a tactful, soft-spoken guy: in an interview in 2007 with “Novaya Gazeta,” he responded to a question about charges of xenophobia with the terse statement, “In every country there are decent people and there are freaks.” Cargo 200 is his first film to be screened outside of festivals in the US in a decade, since 1997’s Brother, so I’ve included contextual notes as needed.

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Introducing a screening at the Starz! Green Room yesterday of a segment from In Their Boots, a new web-to-PBS series from Brave New Foundation, Jim Miller disclaimed that there were no ideological intentions fueling this new work from the production company that brought you Iraq For Sale and Fox News Porn. Though Miller, Robert Greenwald and their Brave New compatriots are very much in the business of attempting to bring down the modern conservative movement, Miller maintains that this series is “Totally non-partisan…we’re not taking a stance on the war, good or bad or anything.”

On a long enough timeline, this will probably turn out to be an indefensible statement, but as far as the quarter of an hour of reality TV-style footage shown here on Monday, it’s reasonably sound. …Read more

Probably in part thanks to the Tribeca Film Festival’s new pre-fest review embargo, it’s been extremely difficult thus far to get a sense of which of the festivals many, many titles are actually worth seeking out and seeing. I’m sure the embargo has a purpose, but the fact remains that we’re now five days away from opening night, and we’re starring down a festival devoid of buzz. As someone trying to figure out how to cover the thing, I’m in the odd position of reevaluating givens: I don’t know what to do with the rest of the lineup, but I know Tom Hall’s last blog post makes me think Speed Racer looks fucking awesome.

So spelunking the catalog, all I really have to go on is keywords. And, my my, what keywords do we have for the Encounters selection, The Objective: A horror film. Set in Afghanistan, beginning three days after 9/11. About a Special Ops mission in search of an Al Qaeda nukes stash, gone horribly wrong. Directed by Daniel Myrick, best known as the co-director of The Blair Witch Project. Are our jaws dropping in unison?

It’s the kind of film everyone would be talking about, if only Tribeca would let us review it before it premieres. But, they didn’t put an embargo on reviewing the trailer…

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• “One thing’s for certain: no other rock-and-roll band has aligned itself with more great directors than the Stones,” notes Glenn Kenny. He’s particularly fond of Jean-Luc Godard’s One Plus One, AKA Sympathy For The Devil.
• At Indie Eye, Alison Willmore has a round-up of links related to Fitna, the short, Dutch, anti-Qur’an doc that allegedly provoked two Taliban attacks on Dutch forces in Afghanistan.
• Sean P. Means is compiling a running tally of print film critics who have lost their jobs since 2006. He’s currently up to 27. Via Jeff Wells. Related: David Carr’s April 1 “wither critics” piece in the New York Times, which I had nothing to say about and thus didn’t link to earlier in the week.
• Karina has been on the road, hence the slowness around here for the past few days. We’ll be back to regular speed tomorrow.

As political polemic and as entertainment, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is mostly unsuccessful, but as a statement of purpose on behalf of its co-star and executive producer, Tom Cruise, it’s mildly fascinating. Through sheer force of star power, Cruise manages to temporarily hijack this lumpy lecture, and turn it into a battle cry against the corporate media that both built and destroyed him.

You probably don’t need to be reminded that Cruise has had a rough couple of years, culminating in the announcement in November 2006 that he and long-time producing partner Paula Wagner had signed a deal to resurrect MGM’s dormant United Artists. Some saw this as a savvy move for both Cruise and MGM: disappointing box office on Mission Impossible: 3 aside, there’s still no one on the planet with Cruise’s international name-and-face recognition, and as he proved with War of the Worlds, which made $65 million in its first weekend just a scant month after the couch jumping incident, the guy can open the right project regardless of what’s going on in his personal life. But skeptics (myself included) wondered if MGM was just throwing Cruise a bone—if they weren’t doing anything with UA anyway, was handing the brand over really a sure sign of confidence?

The guy had—has–something to prove. With his career at the crossroads, the choice of Lions For Lambs as the vehicle to drive him over the hump is not an immediately logical one. It’s worth noting that Cruise didn’t go looking for politically relevant story to tell—Redford signed on to direct the script, and then called Cruise, looking to cast him. And I may get permanently disinvited from Sundance for saying this, but I’m not sure if Redford fully knew what he was getting into.

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• While Tom Cruise continued to abstain from publicizing his own politics on the Lions For Lambs press tour, the film’s director and co-star Robert Redford “lash[ed] out against the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” at a press conference in Rome yesterday. “We have lost lives, we’ve lost sacred freedoms, we’ve lost financial stability; we’ve lost our position of respect on the world stage,” said the sometime Sundance Kid.
• “The world’s first user-generated movie” begins shooting this week in London. MySpace users picked the director and some of the stars; Ewan Bremner’s in it, too. Be very afraid.
• I’m not sure exactly what “two-way plug-and-play technology” entails, but the MPAA thinks it puts their copyrights at risk, and they want the FCC to ban consumer electronics manufacturers from making and selling it.

• Paramount Vantage has delayed the worldwide release of The Kite Runner until mid-December, so that they can transport the film’s young, Afghani stars, who believe they may be in danger if they stay in their home country while the film is being released, to the US. 12-year-old actor Ahmad Khan says he was not aware that he was to play the victim of a rape in the film until the day the scene was shot, and though the finished scene is not graphic, Khan and his family are concerned about cultural repercussions.
• In more release date shuffling, Leatherheads, George Clooney’s latest directorial effort, has been pushed back from December to April. The official line is that Clooney, can’t juggle finishing the film with his duties shooting the next Coen Brothers film and promoting Michael Clayton, all the while recovering from a broken rib. Elsewhere, there are whispers of re-casting and reshoots.
• Buzz on the Ben Stiller/Farrelly Brothers remake of The Heartbreak Kid is somewhat less toxic than I would have guessed, but The Hollywood Reporter is still pegging it an unremarkable $20 million opening weekend.