David Gordon Green explores devastation and rebuilding on the scale of both a burnt out Texan forest and the fragile human heart in this strange, funny and sincere film which marks the director’s long awaited return to form.

As with Green’s early works we find ourselves in an autumnal tinted rural America. Two road workers are tasked with repainting the street lines following a devastating forest fire. Alvin (Paul Rudd), a keen outdoors man and a hopeless romantic, is happy to work away and keep the wages flowing back to the woman he loves. Lance (Emile Hirsch at his most plump and likable yet), all youthful arrogance and naivety, is the brother to Alvin’s love and it seems, clearly employed due to this. The pair start out as chalk and cheese but trouble with women in both their lives gradually brings the two men together. The homebrewed paint stripper of a local truck driver helps to loosen their tongues until inevitably, a brotherly bond is formed. Green isolates his characters in the landscape’s quiet beauty and charred remains, choosing never to show us their lives outside the forest and leaving them to reveal it as the film and their companionship develops.

                All the Real Girls marked a great debut. George Washington was even better. Since then fans of Green’s work have only had the fun but frivolous Pineapple Express and the consistent weirdness of Eastbound and Down to keep hopes of a return alive. A run of big budget trash looked to spell the end for the once promising director but Avalanche represents a welcome return to form; a step back from the studios and a step forward creatively; a step into stranger waters perhaps. Sure it might seem easy to go low budget with friends like Paul Rudd to call upon but when an on-form David Gordon Green has final cut, there’s just no one out there who does it quite like him. A director as adept with the strange way people relate to each other as he is with the strange winds in the trees.

It was a sad day for the cinematic vocabulary when Andrew Bujalski uttered the term mumblecore,  forever rendering it impossible to discuss any low key indie talkies without referencing the dreadfully named genre but such is life. Frances Ha sees the M-word’s favourite leading lady (Greta Gerwig) joining perhaps its greatest patron (Noah Baumbach) for a neat little take on the bummer of getting left behind. It’s a bit Girls, maybe a bit Manhattan, but Frances Ha can, respectfully, stand on its own.

Frances (Gerwig) and Sophie (Mickey Summer) are two over-educated underworked friends living out the Brooklyn dream as they slip into their late 20s. “We’re basically the same person but with different hair” gushes Frances whenever asked about her joint-at-the-hip best pal. Sharing an apartment and seemingly co-dependent the girls look happy enough until a Wall Street “gotta take a leak” suit named Patch comes into Sophie’s life. The new love interest unknowingly drives a wedge between the pair and so a rudderless Frances is left to face the first-world grind without the support of her closest confidant.

As with all of Baumbach’s films the self-loathing laughs cut uncomfortably close to the bone, at one excruciating point Frances finds herself at a dinner party of Sophie’s new friends and must face the ruthless observation: “you look older than her, but sort of, less grown up.” Frances does her best to ignore it all and power-pop dance her way to some level of contentment but it all seems so futile. Her efforts to maintain a youthful nonchalance lead her to all sorts of problems; eventually culminating in an off the cuff, credit destroying and hilariously crap lost-weekend in Paris. Given the raw facts it would be difficult to not draw some comparisons to Lena Dunham’s Girls- Adam Driver even plays a role- but Gerwig’s naivety provides a solid antithesis to the often self-obsessed show. Baumbach has always been interested in these off putting charlatan types but Frances breaks the cycle by being, well, quite sound.

Baumbach gave Gerwig what was arguably her first break playing a youthful distraction for Ben Stiller’s mid-life crisis in Greenberg, since then she’s chalked down credits for such art-house royalty as Whit Stillman and Woody Allen but she still retains a sort of pleasant normalness and as Frances she brings all that goofy charm while never going too manic pixie dream girl. A call from Wes Anderson looks inevitable.

After almost a decade in cinema obscurity Shane Carruth landed in Berlin yesterday to present his highly anticipated second feature Upstream Color for the first time to a European audience.  Since his peerless micro-budget gem Primer announced his arrival at Sundance all those moons ago the director has garnered a strong cult following in spite of- or perhaps fuelled by- having produced nothing since. A packed out Sunday 10pm screening, with temperatures hitting -5 outside, was a clear testament to that.

                The film is quite stunning. A sort of Organic opera following the life cycle of a parasitic bug through the relationship of the two damaged humans it inhabits. The parasite’s immediate effect is of extreme coercion and so we follow a thief who uses the bug to rob his helpless victims blind. Then the host, still under the influence, is passed on to a mysterious pig-farming sound-synthesis enthusiast (Andrew Sensenig) who transfers the affliction to his pigs, thus creating a symbiotic relationship between them- bear with me- and the hosts. The victim eventually wakes in the middle of nowhere with no recollection. The story follows two such people (played by Amy Seimetz and Carruth himself) who, after a chance meeting, become romantically involved unaware of the bond between them and oblivious to the farmer’s strange music which seems to be influencing both their lives.

The Q&A session flowed easily with Carruth fielding questions on everything from his background in mathematics to more stylistic queries. With Upstream, Carruth trades the sterile storage facility of Primer for a much more ethereal feel, with the camera examining dirt, soil and flowing capillaries with a crisp shallow depth of field. This biological approach, the director explained, was a continuation of his love for scientific perfections. Like the heavy physics jargon he employed in Primer the cyclical life span of the parasite and these symbiotic relationships are something which can be found in the natural world. Carruth’s use of these tangible ideas is what lends the stories their fascinating sense of possibility and takes them out of the fantasy world and into something closer to myth or fable. 

Pulling off something like this is pure catnip for Sci-Fi fans so when a quaint request for a signed poster was heard from the back of the sold out crowd, it proved a pleasant full stop to the evening.