A lot of military stories ladle on audio-visual artifice, in an attempt to create an impactful audience identification with the disorienting nature of war or its psychological after-effects. “Return,” however, is a subjective document that plays out against the banality of everyday existence, wherein crisis unfolds in slow motion, and sometimes almost imperceptible strokes. The film stars Linda Cardellini as Kelli, a Rust Belt supply line soldier who comes back from a tour of duty and experiences a vague, free-floating sense of dislocation from her plumber husband Mike (Michael Shannon) and two young girls, and in the din of domestic homecoming dramas, the film is a striking, humane, low-fi offering….

While many directors are all too content to mine a seam, German-born filmmaker Wim Wenders (“Wings of Desire,” “The Buena Vista Social Club,” “Paris, Texas,” the ambitious “Until the End of the World”) has enjoyed a delightfully diverse career, jumping back and forth between narrative and nonfiction works. His latest film, the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-nominated documentary “Pina,” taps into his decades-long friendship with the late, lauded choreographer Pina Bausch, imaginatively exploring her work in 3-D by utilizing the dancers of her Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble. In a wide-ranging, half-hour chat — with Dave Matthews Band, the Yeah Yeahs and other light rock tunes unfolding at a remove in the background of the lush…

German-born director Uwe Boll is a throwback of sorts to the pioneers of traveling, self-distributed filmmaking — part storyteller, (perhaps much larger) part huckster. Whatever one thinks of him, he is certainly prolific, cranking out around three movies a year over the last half-decade. Brent Simon recently had a chance to speak with the inimitable Boll about his new film ”In the Name of the King 2,” U.S. presidential politics, his passion project “Bailout,” which 2011 box office hit he can’t believe made so much money, and how his wife doesn’t like his movies. The conversation is excerpted below: ShockYa: ”In the Name of the King 2″ speaks a lot of prophesy and destiny,…

For his narrative feature film debut, director Jim Loach chose to tackle a sprawling tale of warped governmental policy, spanning three decades and involving the forced deportation of British kids to Australia. Almost as shocking as its narrative — which tells the story of literally tens of thousands of children, and the terrible abuses they suffered after in many cases being told that their parents were dead — is the fact that it is hardly known the United States, where tales of adolescent mistreatment and murder are typically seized upon with a white-hot tabloid fervor, grist for the mill of the 24-hour cable news channels. ShockYa had the chance recently to speak to Loach one-on-one, about…

Comedy is hard, as the saying goes, but unshakably in the blood of writer-director Trent Cooper, whose latest film, the rangy ensemble farce “Father of Invention,” centers on a disgraced infomercial wizard, Robert Axle (Kevin Spacey), who gets out of prison and tries to start putting his life back together. Robert shacks up with his semi-estranged daughter (Camilla Belle) and her roommates, and gets a job working at a retail superstore, but finds his ex-wife (Virginia Madsen) remarried, and various attempts to secure start-up financing for a new idea stymied at every turn. ShockYa recently had a chance to talk one-on-one with Cooper, about his new movie, his feelings of warmth and affinity for…

In his new documentary “Sarah Palin: You Betcha!,” director Nick Broomfield indulges in some of his characteristically bumbling, nice-guy provocation, learning more about Palin’s background and hometown while engaging in what seemingly becomes an increasingly futile attempt to secure an interview with her. Fortunately for ShockYa, the British-born filmmaker isn’t as difficult to pin down as his most recent subject. We had a chance to speak to Broomfield one-on-one recently, and although the conversation occurred just days before Palin officially announced that she is not seeking the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the light that he sheds on her upbringing and early political career via the nearly three months he spent in Wasilla, Alaska, during his…

If babies need more sleep for their developing brains, as studies have confirmed, then our ever-increasing reliance on email and text messaging have some unforseen consequences for human evolution? Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain tackles these and other questions at the intersection of technology and humanity in ”Connected,” a sort of investigative documentary and canted memoir which bowed at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, and stands poised to release both in theaters and across various multimedia platforms. This isn’t a new topic of interest for Shlain, who years ago launched the honorific Webby Awards, casting a spotlight on some of the best creativity on the Internet. ShockYa had a chance to speak…

Vera Farmiga is a wonderfully talented actress, but with her self-effacing laugh, easy disposition and comfortable slouch, she has a lot of work to do before she perfects the character of a swaggering director. She swears life behind the camera wasn’t a burning professional goal of hers, but Farmiga spent several years work-shopping a screenplay based on Carolyn Briggs’ “The Dark World” with Briggs and fellow writer Tim Metcalfe. The result is her wonderfully subtle directorial debut, “Higher Ground,” and it’s as full-bodied, honest and moving a portrait of a young, fundamentally religious family, and all the struggles they experience, as has ever been put to screen — perhaps no small…

Few actors get to star in a monster commercial smash that is also a zeitgeist hit, but that was Joshua Leonard’s experience with “The Blair Witch Project,” which turned a meager $60,000 production budget into almost $250 million in worldwide theatrical receipts, and owned the summer of 1999 (and beyond, in the form of countless spoofs, homages and far less inspired rip-offs) like no other indie movie of its time. Leonard continued to act over the years, and achieved a second peak of artistic acclaim two years back in Lynn Shelton’s “Humpday,” in which he and a fellow heterosexual friend (Mark Duplass) find themselves locked in a pact/dare to make…

Director Craig Gillespie has had an interesting career. After making his debut with “Lars and the Real Girl,” episodic television work ensued, followed by a contretemps over the comedy “Mr. Woodcock,” starring Seann William Scott, Susan Sarandon and Billy Bob Thornton that saw him removed from the project. His latest film is the adaptation/reboot of 1985′s horror-comedy “Fright Night,” starring Anton Yelchin as a Las Vegas high school kid who finds out his new neighbor (Colin Farrell) is actually a vampire. ShockYa recently had the chance to talk to Gillespie one-on-one about what attracted him to “Fright Night,” what he thought about shooting the movie in 3-D, and his next film, the genre…