“The Mend,” IFC Center, opens August 21John Magary’s mightily impressive debut film is a tale of sibling love and hate, featuring a messy-haired performance by Josh Lucas as Mat, who in the opening minutes is kicked out of his girlfriend’s apartment and begins rip-roaring through the city streets — stumbling around, throwing a drink at a woman in a bar. He is tense and dangerous because of his unpredictability. His motives, even purpose, are unclear.Eventually Mat ends up at a party hosted by his brother Alan (Stephen Plunkett) and his girlfriend Farrah (Mickey Sumner). The two are planning a camping trip for the next day, where, we later find out, Alan plans to propose marriage. Both are none too happy to find Mat crashing their get-together, watching him antagonize people while slumped on the couch. But they can’t kick him out. He is family, a part of themselves, albeit the part you try to hide.Things escalate from there. Mat ends up staying at his brother’s apartment while they are away, and immediately invites his girlfriend and her young son over, spreading out over the small space. When Alan returns from his vacation early, and alone, bonds are formed and broken among the group, while the personalities of the brothers begin to merge.Propelled by a scatter-brained energy, “The Mend” blends kinetic naturalism with storybook innocence, including iris shots out of a silent movie and a scene where the brothers, on a drunken rampage, literally walk through a movie set thick with fake fog as if entering a dream. It’s this quality that makes the film more interesting than your standard young-white-guys-with-problems narrative that dominates so much of independent cinema.“Who Killed Vincent Chin?” Brooklyn Academy of Music, August 19Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s 1987 documentary, which was nominated for an Academy Award, details the tragic story of Vincent Chin, a Chinese-American man who was killed in the Highland Park neighborhood outside Detroit. While exiting a strip club with friends a week before his wedding, Chin was chased down by Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, two autoworkers who were employed by Chrysler. Apparently an incident had occurred inside the establishment, although what exactly happened changes depending on who is telling the story. What we do know is that Ebens and Nitz followed Chin out of the club, caught up with him at a local McDonalds, and beat him so viscously with a baseball bat that he suffered brain-damage and died four days later.Reportedly, Ebens and Nitz were yelling racial slurs at Chin, telling him he was to blame for the slew of layoffs that had occurred in the auto-industry due to increased Japanese competition. (Chin, as mentioned above, was Chinese-American.) The film follows the various trials and the roles played by investigative journalists and activists in shedding light on hate crimes against Asian Americans, and features heartbreaking interviews with Chin’s mother.“X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes,” Anthology Film Archives, August 21Roger Corman’s 1963 low-budget magnum opus screens at Anthology Film Archives as part of the essential American International Pictures series, dedicated to the b-movie production house that released an astonishing array of films from the 1950s to the 1970s. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, and Jack Nicholson are some of the bold-faced names that worked with the company, but the name that rings truest to the spirit of AIP is Corman, who worked on more than 40 films for the company either as producer or director. Corman will be present at the screening of “X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes” on August 21 for a conversation following the film, and will appear on August 22 for screenings of “Bucket of Blood” (1959) And “Tomb of Ligeia” (1964), both of which he directed.“Fort Tilden,” IFC Center, ongoingThe feature-length debut of writer-directors Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers that follows two 20-somthings on a journey from Williamsburg to the titular beach, is part, as ARTINFO’s Scott Indrisek explains, of a growing cannon which includes Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” the web-series “High Maintenance,” and Comedy Central’s “Broad City.”“As a 34-year-old Brooklynite who feels a bit uncomfortably close to the target demographic of “Fort Tilden,” it’s hard to know how to process the film,” Indrisek writes. “At the very least, it’s a highly entertaining contribution to the body of gently self-hating entertainment centered on the world’s most self-loving city — but where do you go from there?”“Mistress America,” Landmark Sunshine Cinema, ongoingNoah Baumbach has gone back to making fully formed comedies about young people, which we couldn’t be more happy about. His middle-aged “what’s up with the kids these days?” routine, most notably in the Ben Stiller-starring duo “Greenberg” and “While We’re Young,” has been exhausting. This one features current muse Greta Gerwig, who co-wrote the script and stars as an over-eager and hyper-active city dweller who develops a relationship with her soon-to-be stepsister, a lonely freshman at Barnard, pulling her along as they dream and scheme.
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