The Life Before Her Eyes, the latest film by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog), opened this weekend in limited release. In part as a response to the negative reviews by a number of critics, Perelman said recently in an interview that he's decided that it's better for audiences to know the ending going in (I did confirm with Perelman that he actually said this, because I was rather surprised that he would). And while I understand Perelman's desire to counter the critical response to the film in this way, I decided to take a look at what the negative reviews actually say.

First, I'm going to largely ignore the reviews (good and bad) that came out of the Toronto International Film Festival last year, because the cut of the film in theaters now is different. So let's look at what critics have to say about the current cut. Let's look at one titled (ever so objectively) "Hollywood and the War on Women", by Prairie Miller over on News Blaze. Miller starts her "review" of the film with a five-paragraph rant that tries to tie films about the Iraq war into a perceived "war against women" in Hollywood, going so far as to make the accusation that this war is fueled, in part, by male directors and producers whose coffers are being drained by alimony and child support payments. Uh, what?

It's been five years since Vadim Perelman's critically acclaimed feature debut with House of Sand and Fog. Now the director is back with his newest film, The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri. The film is about Diana, whose life starts to crumble as the 15th anniversary of the school shooting she survived nears; it flashes back and forth between older Diana (Thurman) and the younger Diana (Wood) and her best friend Maureen (Amurri) in the weeks leading up to the tragic event. Cinematical sat down with Perelman and Amurri at AFI Dallas to talk about the film, which opens in limited release this weekend.

Cinematical: Eva, can you talk about the challenges of playing this role, which is much more of "nice girl" than you've played in your previous films?

Eva Amurri: The earlier roles I'd had just happened to be more bad girls. This is the first role I'd had where the role was basically all good, this very pure, selfless girl. What's funny is that Vadim really cast us against type – in real life, I'm much more the "bad" girl, while Evan is the serious "good" girl. I was a little worried about it, but I trusted Vadim, and he did a great job guiding us through it. It was an interesting exercise.

(Editor's note: This review originally ran during AFI Dallas. It's being rerun this weekend in conjunction with the film's release.)

I loved House of Sand and Fog, and I've been waiting five long years to see what director Vadim Perelman would come up with next. His latest effort, The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri, is a lovely, nuanced film packed with imagery, and bracketed by an intriguing storyline. The film revolves around Diana, played as a teenager by Wood and an adult by Thurman; the younger Diana was a survivor of a high school shooting, as as the 15-year anniversary of the tragic event nears, the older Diana begins to unravel.

Perelman is not a director who hand-feeds his audience easy answers. With House of Sand and Fog he made heavy use of its moody, gray and brown pallette to set a dark and unsettling mood. With The Life Before Her Eyes, he turns to brilliantly saturated hues of flowers and water to create a sublime tone that evokes what's going on with Diana. The perfect life with professor husband Paul (Brett Cullen) and daughter Emma (Gabrielle Brennan) that she's worked so hard to create is a fairy tale fantasy built on an unstable foundation of unresolved guilt, and we know from the first frames that, hard as she works to sustain it, it's as fragile as the petals of the flowers that embower her garden.

When I was a kid, I loved going to the circus. When I wasn't fantastizing about growing up to become a nun, I was hanging out on my backyard swingset daydreaming about running away to join the circus. My dad took me to see Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus and the Shriner Circus every single year -- I knew which of the Ringling Brothers tours was the best, and at one point I had a serious crush on the teenage son of a lion tamer. I'd never given much thought to the jobs the circus animal trainers had; in my circus fantasies, I was a trapeze girl, flying through the air with no paralyzing fear of heights.

Circus Rosaire, a documentary by director Robyn Bliley, gives us a backstage pass into the lives of the Rosaires, a family of "circus people." The Rosaires have been court jesters and circus performers for nine generations, but they live a much less glamorous life now than they did in the good old days when circus people were treated like royalty. Back in the good old days for circus folk -- before there was a Hollywood creating stars and starlets for the world to obsess over - they'd come into towns and be feted like celebrities These days, they're much more likely to be working a small-town carnival than performing at the White House, on The Tonight Show, or in a palace.

Are you ready for Gamers Gone Wild? The opening minutes of Frag play like a scandal-mongering TV news program, featuring surveillance-cam footage of angry public arguments and wet bikini girls cavorting in a hot tub, complete with a stern-voiced narrator asking probing questions. Is this a cautionary morality tale?

No. After that attention-grabbing preamble, the documentary quickly settles down into a more serious groove, delving deeply into a subject that has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media -- but not by filmmakers. Seth Gordon found a deeply emotional human interest story among devoted video gamers in last year's superb The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. Lincoln Ruchti focused on a group of 80s gamers in Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Archive, also from last year. Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza chose to reinforce many of the worst stereotypes about gamers in his zippy, colorful doc Second Skin, which premiered at South by Southwest last month.

At the control of debut doc director Mike Pasley, Frag explores a wider spectrum of issues, digging into racism, corporate sponsorship, jealousy, competition and ambition. The investigative aspects are balanced by a healthy appreciation and respect for the people involved. There's no sense that the film is looking down its nose at an incomprehensible phenomenon, nor is there an excessive amount of hero worship, even though the best known gamers have their own devoted following.

The second year of AFI Dallas was a big hit with locals, with ticket sales way over expectations. Big kudos have to go to fest director Michael Caine* and his stellar team for working out the kinks from last year's fest and making everything flow smoothly this year, while programming a huge lineup for Dallas cinephiles. Here are some of the pics; a rundown of this year's fest highlights is after the jump:

Glamorous photography is no substitute for compelling dramatic content. Far too many scenes in Blood Brothers look and feel as though director Alexi Tan followed a self-imposed dictum to "light first, act later." His film labors mightily to get its narrative ball rolling, to no avail.

More's the pity, because Blood Brothers was inspired by very rich source material. John Woo's Bullet in the Head, released in 1990, is arguably Woo's most personal and potent work, gut-wrenching to the point where it feels that he simply opened a vein and let his blood seep into every frame (as I've written before). That film was set in war-torn Vietnam in the late 1960s and had a very gritty feel; by the end, it felt as though you'd suffered as much pain and heartache as the three main characters, close friends whose bond of brotherhood was tested under fire.

Woo's film was originally intended as a prequel to his action classics A Better Tomorrow and A Better Tomorrow II. After Woo had a falling out with producer Tsui Hark, the story was free to develop into something more original, without having to tie the characters into the other films. From the looks of things, it appears that Woo and producing partner Terence Chang similarly encouraged Tan to follow his own artistic muse. Tan's script, completed in collaboration with Jiang Dan and Tony Chan, keeps only the most basic outline of Woo's film: three close friends seek their fortune in the world.

I rarely participate in roundtables, but I was glad I did the roundtable at AFI Dallas for Battle in Seattle, the fest's Closing Night film, because Michelle Rodriguez, there in town to promote Battle, got in a few words on Avatar while she was there. I don't know about you, but I'm more excited about Avatar than I have been about any sci-fi film since I don't know when.

I attended the roundtable with Mark Bell from Film Threat and Reelzchannel.com's Heather Huntington. Our time was very compressed -- we had about 15 minutes with Rodriguez and director Stuart Townsend, and they'd already given the "last question" call, but the three of us had talked briefly beforehand about what we wanted to ask, and all of us were hoping to hear something about Avatar while we were there.

Huntington managed to sneak the question in (the trick to that is, avoid eye contact with the PR person at all costs, pretend you didn't hear them, and get your question in ... if the talent is into answering the question, they're not going to tell THAT person to stop talking, right?) Rodriguez was enthusiastic and talked quite a bit about the film, and I typed as fast as I could to keep up with her.

I loved House of Sand and Fog, and I've been waiting five long years to see what director Vadim Perelman would come up with next. His latest effort, The Life Before Her Eyes, starring Uma Thurman, Evan Rachel Wood and Eva Amurri, is a lovely, nuanced film packed with imagery, and bracketed by an intriguing storyline. The film revolves around Diana, played as a teenager by Wood and an adult by Thurman; the younger Diana was a survivor of a high school shooting, as as the 15-year anniversary of the tragic event nears, the older Diana begins to unravel.

Perelman is not a director who hand-feeds his audience easy answers. With House of Sand and Fog he made heavy use of its moody, gray and brown pallette to set a dark and unsettling mood. With The Life Before Her Eyes, he turns to brilliantly saturated hues of flowers and water to create a sublime tone that evokes what's going on with Diana. The perfect life with professor husband Paul (Brett Cullen) and daughter Emma (Gabrielle Brennan) that she's worked so hard to create is a fairy tale fantasy built on an unstable foundation of unresolved guilt, and we know from the first frames that, hard as she works to sustain it, it's as fragile as the petals of the flowers that embower her garden.

I'm in Dallas for the second AFI Dallas Film Festival, and having a great time so far. The fest has worked through some of those first-year kinks and things seem to be sailing along smoothly, though I know there's probably lots of finagling going on behind the scenes that makes whatever glitches do come up invisible to most of us here. Shuttle service for passholders this year is making it much easier to navigate the fest quickly and efficiently between venues. The festival lounge is great this year -- the space is nicely decorated, there are always yummy snacks on hand, the drinks flow all night long, and Guitar Hero battles happen nightly.

I kicked things off here on Tuesday moderating a panel on women filmmakers for a private event held for a group of high-powered corporate women. Filmmakers SJ Main (Luck of the Draw) and Robin Bliley (Circus Rosaire) made my job super easy; both had many insights to share about being independent filmmakers and women working in the business, and the women (and their husbands) in attendance had many thought-provoking questions that kept the tone conversational and interesting.

"Ha ha! Your medium is dying!" -- Nelson, The Simpsons.

When an animated character on a broadcast network show mocks your medium, you know you're really in trouble. The departure of film critics from print outlets, including most recently Nathan Lee from The Village Voice and David Ansen from Newsweek, has inspired many observers to ponder the future of film criticism. The bigger story is that the newspaper industry as a whole has been plagued by declining profits since the turn of the century, with hundreds of workers accepting buy-outs or being laid off in the last few years.

Manny Mendoza, a newspaperman since 1979, saw the writing on the wall and accepted a buy-out offer from the Dallas Morning News a couple of years ago. Bitten by the moviemaking bug, he wanted to make a documentary about local muralists, but when he enlisted the assistance of veteran filmmaker Mark Birnbaum, Birnbaum convinced him that they should instead make a film about what was happening to the print medium. The result of their efforts, Stop the Presses: The American Newspaper in Peril, had its world premiere at AFI Dallas this week, and it's an absorbing account that should appeal to anyone concerned about the future of democracy.

Is it possible to make a non-partisan film about partisanship? Even more pertinent: Is it possible to watch a film on such a politically-charged subject without getting riled up, one way or another? Kelly Nyks does his level best to present a balanced discussion in Split: A Divided America, a documentary that had its world premiere at AFI Dallas.

Walking a veritable tightrope between red and blue states, Nyks travels across the country, talking to a wide cross-section of random citizens, party leaders, political celebrities and media pundits. He winds up with a sincere, thoughtful inquiry into the neuroses of a fractured nation. In its own quiet way, Split is a polite rebuke to the idea that documentaries on political subjects must be adversarial -- or relentlessly one-sided -- to be worthwhile.

With the second edition of AFI Dallas in full swing, the festival's first acquisition deal was announced. Cinema Libre Studios has picked up worldwide rights to Glenn Gers' Disfigured, a narrative feature that had two screenings at the festival this past weekend. The film stars Deidra Edwards and Staci Lawrence as two women dealing with "body issues and self-acceptance," according to the festival program notes.

The film initially focuses on sales clerk Lydia (Edwards, making her screen debut), a plus-sized woman who "struggles with complex feelings about her body and its place in the world," in the words of the announcement. Meanwhile, real estate agent Darcy (Lawrence, in her first feature lead), a recovering anorexic, "is struggling with the same issues but from a very different perspective." The two women meet and find they have much more in common than they might have anticipated.

The second edition of the AFI Dallas International Film Festival gets underway Thursday night. Among the dozens of films premiering for local audiences, Stuart Gordon's Stuck, inspired by real-life events that transpired in nearby Fort Worth, stands out like a sore thumb to me. The film received some good reviews when it premiered in Toronto last fall; our own Scott Weinberg called it "more of a twisted thriller than an out-and-out horror movie ... [with] a sly and simple streak of social commentary." But my interest lies in issues beyond the film itself. Namely, can fictional depictions of real-life stories affect people like secondhand smoke?

One evening in the fall of 2001, twenty-something nurse's aide Chante Mallard partied at a club, drank some alcohol, split a tab of Ecstasy, smoked some marijuana, left the club, accepted a ride from a friend, picked up her car at her friend's apartment, and climbed into her gold Chevrolet Cavalier. A few minutes later, she hit a man on a dimly-lit highway. She was a mile and a half from her house in southeast Fort Worth, Texas.

Gregory Glenn Biggs flew into her windshield head-first. Mallard headed home. Badly injured, bleeding profusely and stuck in the cracked windshield, the hapless Biggs pleaded for help. Mallard pulled into her garage, got out of her car, closed the garage door, and went to bed. Biggs died.

The complete line-up for the second edition of the AFI Dallas International Film Festival has been announced, and beyond the galas and the glitter, the programming team has assembled an intriguing schedule. Robert Wilonsky of Unfair Park was the first to post the news and highlighted several of his recommendations.

First, though, the stars: Helen Hunt will appear in support of her directorial debut Then She Found Me, which will serve as the Opening Night Gala on March 27, and Charlize Theron and Woody Harrelson will walk the red carpet for the closing night presentation, Battle in Seattle. Sometime in between, Robert De Niro and Barry Levinson will come out hustling for their latest, What Just Happened? Special awards will be given to Hunt, Theron, Jack Lemmon (in care of the late actor's widow, Felicia Farr), Mickey Rooney (?!), and Todd Wagner.

AFI Dallas established itself on the local social calendar last year as a premium civic-boosting event. That's good for the city, but as a film buff, I'm glad to see more international films in the narrative competition, more docs, an expanded and ace-looking section devoted to music docs ("Deep Ellum Sounds"), an entirely recommended six-film "Mavericks" section (featuring the French Chrysalis and the Japanese Vexille), and a ton of shorts. There's a fair share of titles that are dragging around lukewarm notices (see What Just Happaned? above), but I'm glad that local audiences will have a chance to decide for themselves. Cinematical will be covering the festival, which begins on March 27 and runs through April 6.