C R I T I C ’ S   C H O I C E A forum for the nation’s leading critics to champion their favorite upcoming independent films

Talk to Me • by Lisa Kennedy, a film critic for The Denver Post In a smokey pool hall, radio producer Dewey Hughes takes mouthy ex-con Petey Greene to school. The metaphorical whuppping Don Cheadle’s character receives comes in the nick of time in Kasi Lemmons’ rousing, rhythmic telling of Ralph Waldo “Petey” Green’s rise as a controversial and beloved media personality in Washington, D.C. at AM station WOL. Petey has been taunting Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) as nothing but a “white boy with a tan,” a Sidney Poitier wannabe. And it’s all getting a bit tiresome—to Hughes, to us. Call him Mr. Tibbs indeed. Lemmons returns with her best movie since 1997’s astonishing debut Eve’s Bayou. Green was one of the originators of the “tell it like it is” style. When he died in 1984, his funeral was attended by more than 10,000 mourners. Cheadle and Ejiofor spar and push against each other like boxers in a title bout then embrace a story of complicated friendship like beloved brothers. Set in the ’60s and ’70s, Talk to Me will pique questions about radio’s power to quell and incite. But its deepest pleasures—besides kicking R&B tunes and the glorious plumage of the period—come as the performers play out the bedeviling contradictions and heady power of an era.

Manufactured Landscapes • by Walter Chaw, a film critic for FilmFreakCentral.net and the radio-syndicated Bill Press Show There’s something about Jennifer Baichwal’s profiles of artists. Making her debut with a nicely modulated piece on writer Paul Bowles, Baichwal heard her muse with The True Meaning of Pictures, a profile of Appalachian portrait photographer Shelby Lee Adams that dug gratifyingly deep into the question of where representation becomes exploitation and, trickier still, how the audience might have as much to do with that difficult equation as the subject or the essayist. With Manufactured Landscapes, Baichwal looks at the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, an artist who takes landscapes of industrial wastelands that reveal men to be astonishingly productive beasts—and in that same stroke, destructive, too. Burtynsky’s photographs invite the eye to make terrible, beautiful sense of the myriad ravages of industry. By putting a frame around chaos, he forces philosophy on it; and by exhibiting it in galleries in the middle of the affluence enjoying the lion’s share of the plunder from these wastelands, he introduces irony. Manufactured Landscapes is that rarity of a moral film that resists moralizing. The opening eight-minute tracking shot, pulling laterally across an infinite assembly plant somewhere in China, is humbling; but when it’s revealed that the factory’s workforce, carefully sorting through exported industrial litter for reusable materials, has most likely been mortally contaminated by, among other things, lead and phosphorus, the barbed, brilliant ambivalence of Baichwal’s film is crystallized. Manufactured Landscapes bristles with profound images and ideas; its ability to provoke marks it as one of the most exciting films of the year.

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