When you first see Catherine, she’s looking upward, her teary, blotchy face filling the frame. She’s suffering, all right, you better believe it, although she doesn’t seem to be doing a particularly good job of convincing the guy who’s mostly off-camera. She looks like a mess — pathetic, really, with her smeared black eye makeup and the tears that just keep pooling and dribbling. The funny thing is that with her wet raccoon eyes and red nose, Catherine — a sensational Elisabeth Moss — also looks like a sad clown. All that’s missing is the black velvet background. 
 
 By the time Catherine exits “Queen of Earth,” her frown has turned upside down and a grimace of abject misery has transformed into a vision of manic happiness as if she had traded in her tragedy mask for a comedy one. That it’s unclear which face is scarier, more unnerving, is in keeping with the director Alex Ross Perry’s gift for destabilization, for setting a mood only to violently upend it with cutting looks, dissonant musical chords and off-kilter camera angles. That Catherine seems to be swapping theater masks even as Ms. Moss brings tremendous depth of feeling to the role is in line with the arch self-consciousness of “Queen of Earth,” an art film in quotation marks. 
 
 Women’s tears — drops of joy and madness both — have nourished innumerable movies, art cinema included. The wellspring for Catherine’s opening waterworks is twofold: Her beloved father, a famous painter, has recently died, and her lover, James (Kentucker Audley, all smiles and spinelessness), is now leaving her for another woman. In many contemporary movies, the director would cut back and forth between Catherine and James’s faces during this scene, for a typical shot, reverse-shot exchange. Often, the camera would make like Tinker Bell, flitting between the characters to peek from behind one and gawp at the other. Mr. Perry avoids over-the-shoulder shots, but, as suggested by the opener that turns Catherine’s face into a landscape of pain, he likes claustrophobic close-ups. ||||| EXPAND Uncle Kent 2 Nathan M. Miller 
 
 There's no better barometer of the climate of independent filmmaking in America than BAMcinemaFest. And there's no better time for it than now. Many were surprised to learn recently that the New York Times, doubtless weary of the glorified home movies and feature-length vanity projects snapping up print real estate, had revised its traditional policy of reviewing every theatrical release in the city. (The Voice, too, now only reviews most new films.) It shouldn't seem so surprising. A change was necessary: With more than a thousand features opening in New York every year, there are simply too many films. It's easier than ever for the great ones to get lost in the deluge of notices. 
 
 The festival's appeal has always been curatorial acumen. 
 
 The appeal of BAMcinemaFest has always been its curatorial acumen. The festival, now in its seventh year, trawls the glut and holds aloft the gleaming treasures — the rare films, the exemplars, whose brilliance makes the deluge worthwhile. It's easy for moviegoers to resign themselves to mediocrity. (Think of Wallace Shawn's diagnosis, in My Dinner With Andre, of the modern theater: The form has been "redefined in such a trivial way" that even the likably superficial is applauded as "pretty good.") But greatness can be galvanizing: It can restore the faith. BAMcinemaFest, with its manageably small slate and emphasis, honed across each iteration, on quality over quantity and proven excellence over coveted premieres, offers something of an ideal cross-section of the American independent film. To take in this program is to glimpse, reliably, our indie cinema at its most essential and vibrant. 
 
 So let's begin with the best of the best. With customary judiciousness, BAM's programmers have reserved the honor of a centerpiece screening for the North American premiere of the festival's best film, the startling, razor-sharp thriller Queen of Earth. Alex Ross Perry has a strong claim on being the most skillful young writer-director working in the United States today. Last year brought the clinching argument for the case, the sprawling, Roth-indebted masterpiece Listen Up Philip, but it was three years earlier, in 2011, that the talent was resoundingly announced: That was the year of his exquisite road comedy The Color Wheel — which played at BAMcinemaFest. 
 
 Queen of Earth, a genre film and what you might call an exercise in form, is a more marginal work than Philip. But even minor Perry outclasses most contemporary majors. Its thrills, conceived in the Polanski mold, are highly concentrated and deftly realized, registered on a heady pitch somewhere between Jacob's Ladder and Knife in the Water. Largely a chamber piece for two women — Katherine Waterston and Elisabeth Moss, both excellent in hugely demanding roles — the film also welcomes, and indeed earns, Persona comparisons. This is vigorous, frightening, electrifying stuff. 
 
 As it happens, Queen of Earth isn't the festival's only top-notch thriller — hardly the most common mode for indie filmmakers. Karyn Kusama, director of Jennifer's Bodyand, less memorably, Æon Flux, returns in triumph withThe Invitation, a dinner-party mystery so sweat-inducingly tense that I could only watch it through laced fingers. The less revealed here about its inexhaustibly intriguing, slow-burn plot the better — and Kusama proves withholding to great effect — but suffice it to say that what begins as a somewhat ominous middle-class soiree soon transforms, irresistibly, into something rather more severe. Kusama gets exceptional mileage out of a narrow premise and one simple, almost theatrical set. And from her star, Logan Marshall-Green, she coaxes a performance of surprising depth. 
 
 Nasty Baby Courtesy The Orchard 
 
 Another strong performance is at the heart of Sebastián Silva's beguiling thriller-hybrid Nasty Baby — and it happens to be Silva's own. The Chilean filmmaker, whose wonderful drug comedy Crystal Fairy screened at BAMcinemaFest in 2013, wrote, directed, and stars in his latest effort. At first glance Nasty Baby seems only to be about a young man (Silva) helping to inseminate a single friend (Kristen Wiig) eager to get pregnant. Then it morphs into something else entirely: an eerie, fevered horror picture that, like several of Silva's earlier features, has smart, serious things to say about class, race, and the ways we think about mental illness. It isn't always clear what Silva is up to. But I certainly like it. 
 
 I'm sure many people saw, and even quite liked, Joe Swanberg's Uncle Kent, a chronicle of the banal life of animator and Adventure Time writer Kent Osborne — but were its fans clamoring for a sequel? Perhaps not, and yet here's Osborne and Swanberg with Uncle Kent 2. But this is no mere follow-up. It's a profound expansion of, and meta meditation on, an unabashedly obscure film, zooming out from mumblecore's characteristic solipsism to take the long view on independent cinema, modern technology, and the drab expanse of the slacker life. It starts with Osborne, once again under Swanberg's direction, musing, joint in hand, on a concept for the very film we're watching. But after twelve minutes (as a witty title card informs us), Swanberg is swapped out for Todd Rohal, and a familiarly low-key, naturalistic New York indie mutates into something keyed-up and ludicrously over-the-top. Scarcely are sequels so ambitious — or so original. 
 
 EXPAND Mya Taylor and Kitana Kiki Rodriguez in Tangerine Magnolia Pictures 
 
 Sean Baker's Tangerine closes the festival. With Starlet, from 2012, Baker told the story of a porn star without any of the judgment or thinly veiled condescension filmmakers typically bring to the subject. That same generosity is the defining feature of Tangerine, which marches into the representational minefield of a transgender sex-worker comedy and emerges on the other side proudly unscathed. The heroes are Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), who set out on Christmas Eve on a fervid (if ridiculous) manhunt across Santa Monica Boulevard for Chester (James Ransone), the pimp boyfriend Sin-Dee learns has been cheating. Baker stages the chase as a breezy, farcical adventure, and the energy and vitality of the film, cranked to the max from beginning to end, is completely infectious. 
 
 BAMcinemaFest 
 
 bam.org/bamcinemafest 
 
 June 17–28, BAM ||||| One is forced to spend much more time in examining these women than in getting to understand them. They are treated as objects not subjects -- an attitude which, whether intentionally or not, is relevant to contemporary corruption. 
 
 Full Review… | July 23, 2013 ||||| From One Low Moment, 'Queen Of Earth' Follows A Swirl Of Pain 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Sean Price Williams/Courtesy of IFC Films Sean Price Williams/Courtesy of IFC Films 
 
 Without a second's hesitation, Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth dives right into its heroine's lowest moment, in medias res. The camera stays close to Catherine's face, as smears of mascara frame eyes alight with pain, anger and exhaustion; this has been going on a while and we're just seeing the end of it. Her boyfriend is breaking up with her, which is awful enough, but the timing makes it worse: She's still reeling from the death of her father, an artist who mentored her, and now the two central figures in her life are gone. This double whammy leads to a psychological breakdown that Perry chronicles with unsettling acuity, but the breakup and the death are merely the catalysts. The cause cuts much deeper. 
 
 Set over a week in a secluded vacation home in the Hudson River Valley, Queen of Earth is a typically dyspeptic film by Perry, whose four features as writer-director all pluck at raw nerves. Perry's last effort, Listen Up Philip, significantly darkened the high-toned literary comedies of directors like Noah Baumbach and Woody Allen, offering two authors whose combined egomania sweeps through their lives like a brush fire. Though the characters in Queen of Earth speak their minds as freely and caustically as those in Perry's other films, it deals with a different form of self-destruction, more internal than external. It's not about Catherine having too much grief and loss to bear, but about the way they expose her inability to process it all. Hardship runs through her psyche like alcohol filtered through a diseased liver. 
 
 Evoking a long list of cinematic antecedents — Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Woody Allen's Interiors chiefly, but the suffocating dramas of John Cassavetes and Rainer Werner Fassbinder are on the table, too — Queen of Earth settles on the thorny relationship between Catherine, played by Elisabeth Moss, and her best friend, Virginia, played by Katherine Waterston. "Best friend" should probably be in scare quotes, because they have reached a point where their closeness mostly applies to each of them knowing how to hurt the other the most. Virginia has invited Catherine out to her family retreat to help her find some peace and tranquility, but the hostility kicks in before they even get down the two-mile drive to the place. 
 
 For one, the house is haunted by memories of the previous summer, when Catherine and her boyfriend, James (Kentucker Audley), were locked in happy/sad co-dependency. Catherine was happier then, but the signs of long-term trouble were there, and returning to the scene a year later brings it all flooding back to her. Now she and Virginia have switched places: Catherine doesn't have a man in her life, but Virginia is flirting with Rich (Patrick Fugit), the boy next door, whose habit of casually breezing into the house seemed tolerable last year, but this time has Catherine raging over his flippancy and arrogance. It would be wrong, however, to hold Rich responsible for driving a wedge between the two old friends. They do that well enough on their own. 
 
 "You can get out of someone else's cycle," says Virginia, "but you can't get out of your own." That's as close to a thesis statement as Queen of Earth gets, and it could double as a warning to Perry, whose scripts cycle back to people saying awful things to each other. But here, his stylistic approach to the material makes all the difference: The film isn't a thriller per se, but it has the tension and atmosphere of one, only with emotional violence substituting for the physical kind. Catherine's deterioration feels dread-soaked and dangerous, and it happens with the agonizing deliberateness of a suspense director pulling the strings. Following up a smaller but no less powerful role in Listen Up Philip, Moss plays Catherine not as a woman weakened by circumstance, but as someone who lashes out as a desperate form of self-defense. 
 
 As usual for Perry, a strain of dark comedy runs through the melodrama — not to lighten the mood, exactly, but to bring a little texture and dimension to scenes of uncompromising torment. Perry isn't interested in convincing audiences to embrace prickly pears like Catherine and Virginia — or James and Rich, for that matter — but he does want them to see how friendships like theirs can diverge and how they process pain. We can't get out of their cycle in Queen of Earth, at least not until the credits release us.
– Ever wonder what a psychological breakdown looks like up close? See for yourself in Queen of Earth from Alex Ross Perry. It follows two friends, one of whom has recently lost her father to suicide and her lover to another woman. Here's what critics are saying: Queen of Earth is a "startling, razor-sharp thriller" that might solidify Perry as "the most skillful young writer-director working in the United States today," writes Calum Marsh at Village Voice. "Largely a chamber piece for two women—Katherine Waterston and Elisabeth Moss, both excellent in hugely demanding roles—the film also welcomes, and indeed earns, Persona comparisons. This is vigorous, frightening, electrifying stuff." Scott Tobias at NPR was rapt all the way through. The film focuses on the "thorny relationship" between Catherine (Moss) and Virginia (Waterston) over a week. It "isn't a thriller per se, but it has the tension and atmosphere of one, only with emotional violence substituting for the physical kind," he writes. "Catherine's deterioration feels dread-soaked and dangerous, and it happens with the agonizing deliberateness of a suspense director pulling the strings." Waterston "easily holds your attention," but it's Moss, "with her intimate expressivity, who annihilates you from first tear to last crushing laugh," writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. She's "sensational," and "brings tremendous depth of feeling" to her difficult role, Dargis adds. As for the movie, it's "alternately mesmerizing and suffocating … bringing you uncomfortably close to the action ... only to shove you away." Joe Neumaier agrees "this is Moss' show." She's "excellent as a woman whose mind is unraveling" in a film that "burrows so deep into a psyche that it's scary." The "intense" work "may seem minor but is more than memorable" as it explores "memory, relationships and codependency, between both friends and lovers," he writes at the New York Daily News.