Those quiet eyes become you: Patrick Daughters photographs Feist

With most of last generation's music video luminaries (Fincher, Jonze, Gondry, Romanek and Glazer) having successfully segued into features, who is left to pick up the mantle? I don't pretend to follow this medium very closely, but Jonathan Daughters -- the young helmer behind excellent videos for artists including Beck, Bright Eyes, The Shins and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- is capable, at his best, of work that can stand up to the benchmarks set by his predecessors.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in his remarkable collaborations with Feist. After honing his style with an effervescent video for "Mushaboom" (the standout track off Feist's 2005 album Let It Die), Daughters recently unveiled two new pieces -- "1234" and "My Moon My Man," both from Feist's upcoming album The Reminder -- that re-imagine the music video as magical musical, communal celebrations of body and movement, color and shadow. Daughters's filmmaking -- sweeping, elaborately choreographed takes unfolding in one location -- is gently rhapsodic, elevating Feist's aching ruminations on teenage hopes and naked hearts. The camera's distance from Feist is constantly in flux, as if it's struggling to keep up with her playful prowl. Sometimes it seems scared -- or at least intimidated -- by her lyrics' intimacy, other times excited by her lithe sexuality. Feist is a natural performer, who -- unlike many musicians -- takes pleasure in being watched by a lens. Daughters is entranced, and so are we.

Forty Guns (1957, Samuel Fuller) **

Fuller is nearly peerless in his volcanic filling of the CinemaScope frame, but shouldn't a former journalist's scripts be more organized? This heavily sexualized frontier is loaded with double entendres, clever more than erotic (the leads don't spark together), adding up to historical curiosity rather than Freudian classic. Time Out Film Guide calls Forty Guns the "essence of American action cinema," and in its favoring of sharply visualized incident over lucidity or analysis, it did help -- for better and worse -- clear the path to a genre mired in shorthand.

Disturbia (2007, D.J. Caruso) **

Ironic title for a serviceable teen empowerment flick that is far more interested in assuaging than agitating. But if Caruso and his rote story beats don't make much effort to reveal -- as countless other films already have -- the seedy underbelly of suburban America, they expose something fresher: an adolescent technoculture chained to its devices by a force more omnipotent than any electronic house arrest anklet (canceling an Xbox Live account or swiping an iPod -- "That's 60 gigs of my life!" -- are notable acts of retribution; reading a book is treated as a divine act by an ethereal creature). Disturbia shows overly stimulated imaginations run amok. When most of protagonist Kale's (overemphatic Shia LaBeouf, channeling a bursting teen energy) gadgets are stripped from him (video games, TV, iTunes, car), he cannily uses whatever remains (cell phone, camcorder, monitor) to craft a high-tech game of Clue, like an addict always jonzing for his next fix.

1/4life, 1.1: Pilot (2005 [unaired], Marshall Herskovitz, Edward Zwick) ****

The best pilot I've seen in years -- the genesis of a generational questioning -- was denied a series order. Two of the most acclaimed and seasoned figures in modern television couldn't get ABC (i.e. its green-lighters who blatantly ignored the commercial value of quality) to put their ambitious ensemble piece on the air. 1/4life -- with its overlapping conversations, fleeting glances and romantic pyramids -- captures the messy haze of post-collegiate existence with Reality TV's energy (much of the episode unfolds in a single house), but none of its glibness or plasticity. As a friend wrote me, watching 1/4life's pilot today felt like "total exhilaration mixed with crushing sadness," the thrill of seeing master showrunners at the height of their craft tempered by the knowledge their infant was unaccountably slaughtered. This is great art and an even greater tragedy.

Mirage (1965, Edward Dmytryk) ***

The New York Times' original review places writer Peter Stone's name in its headline (!), never even mentioning Dmytryk once throughout the entire piece. Easy to see why: Mirage, like its younger, frothier brother Charade (1963; also written by Stone), classily weds a sly wit to big, violent mystery and surprisingly few writers in cinema have repeatedly pulled off this feat (Hitchcock's John Michael Hayes and the Coen Bros. are the only others who come to mind; Shane Black, for all his strengths, lacks the elegance) -- it's a highly distinctive stamp. In the years between Charade and Mirage, Stone seems to have grown more cynical, trading radiant romance for a confused country darkened by the Atomic Age's shadow and JFK's assassination. Gregory Peck wounds the film with his stiffness (and he already gave essentially the same performance two decades earlier in Spellbound), but Stone interrogating our worst capitalist impulses and Dmytryk's cryptically jagged editing (which paved the way for Point Blank's fractured rhythms to inaugurate a new era in American film) more than compensate.