Alejandro Adams

This second feature by Alejandro Adams confirms him as an arresting talent. [Viewers] may be fascinated to the point of repeat viewings to sort out its myriad characters and half-buried clues.

Micro in budget, macro in ambition, accomplishment, and scope, Adams's slyly withholding film prompts multiple viewings--and deserves them.

BABNIK looks investigated...Working with no budget and local locations, Adams has burnished all the falsehood out of this fiction. With BABNIK, Adams is no longer a local genius but a national contender.

Alejandro Adams' AROUND THE BAY is a true find...[a] quiet, beautifully realized story. Every single moment of the story rings true, aided by uniformly excellent performances.

It's easier to write about plots than about Adams' intense yet allusive focus, his intelligent sound design, his probing yet cooled-down use of inflammatory material and the pensive quiet force he lets loose in the actors.

With a density of thought and image that makes multiple viewings virtually mandatory in spite of (if not because of) its troubling aftertaste, CANARY is, for my money, a must-see.

It's truly seldom you see an aesthetic, particularly one as overused as the handheld video-cam, employed so judiciously and with such artless efficiency. It's not hyperbolic to suggest the direction could influence or be part of a new trend in filmmaking...Make no mistake: this camera is a weapon.

[AROUND THE BAY is] evocative and lovely...thoroughly enthralling and technically masterful. There are moments of such spare beauty in this film that they register in the body like pebbles dropping into the deep waters of grief. Alejandro Adams articulates the dysfunction of a fractured family with eloquent precision and exact focus. The effect is polished and lapidary, but not without warmth and hope.

Though AROUND THE BAY is an intimate film, this is no small story. This remarkably talented [director] makes a compelling story out of well-chosen images and unsaid, unheard or overheard words. Adams shows that he's that rarity among beginning filmmakers. He is someone who understands all the tools of the cinema. Adams exhibits superb control of his actors. Voldseth's first-rate performance and Adams' direction match the much-praised exposure of soul-barrenness in THERE WILL BE BLOOD, with none of the attendant melodrama.

Adams is deft enough--via a Leigh dramaturgical luckiness, a Dogme aloofness, a quietly uncollected Cassevetes determination, he is a name-dropping choose your own adventure--that any meta-critique of cinema as a Platonic arbiter of otherwise genuine flickers of those seemingly untappable gestures of broken humanity becomes a means rather than an end. This is fine, indulgent cinema. I was shaken by the final strokes of AROUND THE BAY...

There's an imperative quality to the films of director Alejandro Adams that undergirds them like an organic substrate. Yet his films are often oblique and perhaps even evasive, as if Adams is averse to being pinned down to anything as didactic as a "statement." His sensibility is one of circles and repetitions, of fervency resigned to determinism and veiled by abstruseness.

Like the best "little" films, CANARY is a very big film...full of wonder and menace. It is a film to be reckoned with, to be savored, and not to be forgotten.

Adams has made a film that is jam-packed with ideas and is thus defiantly open to interpretation, yet not frustratingly so...I have seen CANARY twice and it has made my brain spin in uncomfortable new directions.

Alejandro Adams, scrappy visionary at the helm of this hell-bent vessel,...breathes his soothsaying outrage in ominous whispers and embeds modern malaise in the modern mundane.

[CANARY is] a sucker punch of a film, and its creator is a master in the making.

The direction of Alejandro Adams is reassuringly muscular...a director who knows what he wants from his films and isn't afraid to push a few boundaries to achieve it.

Adams's directorial style is so accomplished...The easy formalism is impeccable...

CANARY is one of the first films I've seen in ages that sent me scrambling to learn more...because it engaged me on so many levels.

[Adams's] work is so much more ambitious and intelligent and accomplished than most of the Amerindie films that come out of Sundance every year...

Sparse and utilitarian, Alejandro Adams' low-key drama gets right to the point, then tells its dysfunctional family story without pyrotechnics. This sort of story depends on the acting, and Adams' cast delivers.

The direction of Alejandro Adams is reassuringly muscular--it makes its presence felt but is always pushing the story forward rather than preening.

A marvelous and intriguing character study. What a wonderful little film. It would be worth several more viewings, as you are rewarded by pondering its fascinating nuances.

It is tough to watch Adams' films without thinking about cinema itself...

Adams makes cinema like he has something to prove and a system to eradicate.

Mysterious, elliptical, Bresson-like. [CANARY] is to biotech what PRIMER was to time-travel.

[CANARY is] consistently fascinating, even where it purposefully attempts to distance the viewer.

There is no doubting Adams' bravery, complex vision or talent.

I make films because I hate films...I'm fortunate to know some real critics, as vicious as they are perspicacious. It's probably a foregone conclusion that they're my core fanbase. One glance at my films and they can see I hate films as much as they do.

I like my productions to consist of three or four second-unit cameras and no first-unit cameras, neutralizing the director role. I like it when half the people in the scene and the sound guy don’t know we’re already rolling.

Even if I reject Godard or feel that he is not a great filmmaker or an influence, I still feel that somewhere in there he has influenced the course of cinema history and probably influenced a cut of mine without my knowing it.

I think when you tell a real story, when you care about dramaturgy, you're going to be accused at some point of tending toward melodrama.

In my own personal vision of the future, the horror isn't a world dominated by corporations per se, the horror is terminal alienation, the absence of coherent interpersonal communication--in scene after scene, this film addresses those concerns. Canary is sci-fi not at the societal or political or global level but at the personal level. I think that's a quality which both versions of Solaris have too.

Find your favorite gatekeeper and convince him or her that your film should get through the gate. I can tell you from first-hand experience that this approach works. What doesn’t work is treating the gatekeeping establishment like a big impenetrable cloudbank and throwing stuff vaguely upward and hoping it gets all the way to God.

The kinetoscope was a means for an individual to watch cinema. You’d stick your head in it and watch by yourself. Now you watch by yourself on a laptop or phone. Our tools now are re-primitivized.

My characters are human beings, not ideological constructs.