1999

✭✭✭ 1/2

American Beauty
Being John Malkovich
The Blair Witch Project
Boy's Don't Cry
Bringing Out The Dead
Election
Eyes Wide Shut
Fight Club
The Insider
The Limey
Magnolia
The Sixth Sense
Summer Of Sam
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Toy Story 2

✭✭✭

Go
Office Space
American Pie
Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
Bowfinger
Dick
The Green Mile
The Iron Giant
Man On The Moon
The Matrix
Payback
Romance
The Dreamlife Of Angels
South Park: Bigger, Longer And Uncut
Three Kings
The Hurricane
All About My Mother
Rosetta
Arlington Road

✭✭ 1/2

Analyze This
Blast From the Past
Blue Streak
Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo
Galaxy Quest
Double Jeopardy
Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai
Holy Smoke
Mystery Men
Run Lola Run
Never Been Kissed
True Crime

✭✭

Bicentennial Man
Big Daddy
Dogma
End Of Days
The Mummy
The Ninth Gate
Sleepy Hollow
Star Wars: Episode I
The Straight Story
The Out-Of-Towners
The Winslow Boy
Stir of Echoes
Following
The Boondock Saints

✭

Any Given Sunday
The Deep End Of The Ocean
The Story Of Us
Detroit Rock City
The World is Not Enough
She's All That

David Gordon Green's strange career

My oh my how the mighty have fallen. Just around 12 years ago a total no name of a director David Gordon Green debuted his first feature film George Washington to wide and -albeit over the top- acclaim. The film, about a group of rural urban kids in a the mid-west who try to cover up a tragic mistake, even made Roger Ebert's Top Ten List that year and had people comparing Green as a sort of up and coming Terrence Malick-like talent. The follow-up just 3 years ago was All The Real Girls which pitted Zooey Deschanel and Paul Schneider as shot struck lovers in -again- a rural mid western town. It also got great reviews and further advanced word that Green was the next Malick. What with the way he would shoot a particular scene and explore the deepest and simplest parts our very nature. Pretty deep stuff and incredibly artsy too. Gordon Green followed that one up with another simple slice of life Undertow and finished off this incredible run of praised films with Snow Angels in 2008- a scathing and dark look at the dark underlinings of a small town, the film was filled with divorce, murder, a lost child, adultery and a desperate stalker. It's a knockout of a movie that only grew better with repeat viewings.

This is where Gordon Green started to make our heads scratch. He followed Snow Angels with Pineapple Express. I'll admit it a good, funny, memorable movie but definitely not something I ever thought Green would end up doing ditto the follow-up which was the much less successful Your Highness. Yea you heard right Your Highness, a film that made my worst of .. list last year and represented career lows for all involved including Nathalie Portman and James Franco. A trend was starting to show. The "stoner movie". Gordon Green has resorted to making raunchy, stoner movies that don't have anything at all to do with his first four subtle feature films.

His latest came out just a few months ago. The Sitter is mindless, brainless fun yet we expected so much more from him. In it a newly thin Jonah Hill has one messed up, crazy night accompanied by these little brats that try to spoil the party. Of course drugs is involved so are other illegal activities. Yet where are the handprints that first made Gordon Green such a hot commodity in the indie circuit? Has he sold out? Should we even blame him for going to the other side? It's such a strange turnaround for a career that promised so much in the way of artistic prowess. I haven't given up, especially since Gordon Green is just a mere 37 years old, and this odd career is -I'm sure- only going to spring up more surprises.

An Image

If ever there was a film director that has created endless, unforgettable, surreal images in cinema it's Jean Cocteau. Take for example his film Orphee loosely based on the story of Orpheus, an incredibly strange journey into a dark, twisted world created by Cocteau. I wasn't too sure what was happening half the time but the images and story structure here are remarkably done, so's the crisp black and white cinematography. Not a movie for all tastes but a real treat for cinephiles.

Charlize Theron in "Young Adult"

Charlize Theron -beyond her attractive looks- is a great actress. You don't believe me? check out her crazy as fuck performance acting out serial killer Aileen Wuronis' devilish insides in 2003's Monster or her more tamer -but nonetheless revelatory- performance in 2005's North Country. Like it or not she's a real treat to watch when she actually accepts a challenge, such as in her latest picture Jason Reitman's Young Adult, which I must say is really not that interesting a picture safe for Theron and her co star Patton Oswalt's likeably ballsy performances. My eyes were all over Theron as her gestures and facial expressions did wonders on a not-so good screenplay by the overrated Diablo Cody. The Academy Awards stupidly neglected her in the Best Actress category, yet another reason to diss the Oscars.

Weak animation

It's kind of hard to make great animation. You got to not only craft some handsome looking stuff but you also have to put some heart into the story and have us -the audience- suspend our disbelief while watching what is essentially drawn out characters. However I have stated over and over again the pat few years that we live currently in the golden age of animation. Classic after classic gets released on a yearly basis. Astonishing art that will surely last a life time. Lately we've however been in a rut. 2011 was the first year in which I couldn't even find one animated film that I thought was exceptional. Many found lot to like in Rango, a tripped out ode to spaghetti-westerns with a main character in the form of a chameleon-cowboy voiced by Johnny Depp. Got that? many did, I didn't. Rango was -in these eyes- too self involved to work out on screen yet it was one of three animated films that got a "best animated film" nom for the Oscars. Pixar also struck out for the first time in their short 16 year history with Cars 2, a devastatingly dull sequel to a good, solid 2006 treat.

The other nominees? Kung Fu Panda 2? A follow-up to a decent 2008 movie that wasn't necessarily deserving to get made into a sequel. Puss In Boots? A movie based on a character introduced in the Shrek series? mixed reviews greeted it and I didn't even bother to watch it based on .. well just based on the fact that there was much more promising stuff to watch. Rounding out the nominees is Chico and Rita + A Cat In Paris, the academy's justifiable attempt to support hand drawn animation but these two films aren't the ones to rally behind a practically lost art form. Tin Tin -reviewed HERE- justifiably failed to get a nomination and proved once again that animated quality was quasi dead in 2011. Further proof had the prestigious New York Film Critic Circle erase the Best Animated Film category from their ballot based on a weak playing field.

However, ending on a positive here's the truly great movies in animation of the past 15 years of cinema. Most of these are ground breakers that have evolved over time into true classics.

1) Spirited Away
2)Wall E
3) Ratatouille
4) Les Triplettes De Belleville
5) The Fantastic Mr. Fox
6) Up
7) Waking Life
8) The Incredibles
9) Finding Nemo
10) Toy Story 2
11) South Park
12) Toy Story 3
13) The Iron Giant
14) Chicken Run
15) Shrek

Haywire

I don't think a movie like Haywire is meant to stay in your head when the lights come up and the credits roll, after all its plot is necessarily what I call a well thought out one. Director Steven Soderbergh knows that, his cast knows that and I sure as hell hope his audience knows that. Listen, you won't find a single plot-related coherence in this cross-cutting, globe trotting, spectacularly stylish CIA agent gone-rogue movie. Gina Carano, an actual mixed martial arts fighter, is perfectly cast in the role of the said agent. Which is why the action scenes are so briskly paced and furiously lewd and -yes- even realistically made. It's quite clear Carano did her own stunts. Soderbergh knows he's got one hell of a fireball fighter here and he takes advantage of her talents every step of the way. Carano is so fiercely intense that she will likely get another chance in another movie very soon, it's a star making performance which leaves an impeccable impression on the viewer when the movie is done. The same can't always be said about the movie, its plot is so over-cooked and confusing that one might wonder why it had to be done this way. The screenplay by Len Dobbs tries too hard to stuff in plot twists and plot points, I felt suffocated by film's end. Dobbs might learn a thing or two next time with his infusion of filler that almost ends up being killer to the film's momentum. Too bad, because some scenes really stuck in my head and Sodebergh's direction is as assured as his last effort Contagion. Try to turn away when Carano's character goes through a chase scene jumping from one roof top to the other, it's a chase that lasts close to 20 minutes and shows the potential Haywire truly had before it melted away in a speck of dust.

Grading the 9 Best Picture nominees

The Descendants B-
Hugo B+
War Horse B
The Help C-
Moneyball B+
Midnight In Paris B-
The Tree Of Life A
Extremely Loud And Incredibly Loud C-
The Artist N/A

Meh, one of those years where they really didn't pick the right ones. Extremely Loud? Really? Where's Drive? That practically made every top ten list and was as visionary piece of work as almost anything else in 2011. At least they had the guts to vote for Tree Of Life, which I'm sure will get many of the wrong people (we know who they are) renting it and having a WHAT THE FUCK reaction to it - now that's something I'm looking forward to more than the awards show itself. ps promise promise promise to watch The Artist very soon.

A note on "Shame"

I absolutely adored photographer turned director Steven Mcqueen's debut feature Hunger way back when I saw it in 2009. It was the kind of film that not only made you see the world in a new way but showcased the emergence of a bright new talent. So of course I was very much looking forward to his next effort Shame which again starred his Hunger lead actor Michael Fassbender as a sex addict. Dissapointed wouldn't even begin to explain what I felt while watching it. Shame pits Fassbender's sex addict in one deliriously uncomfortable sex scene after another along with slow, unending shots (a given for Mcqueen) yet it all doesn't add up in the end. What we get with Shame is a shallow exercise in style, done with no depth or sense of intimacy. Michael Fassbender is great as the main character but I found Mcqueen was concentrating more on style and less on the character himself. There's a great movie hidden somewhere here but I couldn't find it, even if some scenes did work and the actors got the best they could out of the material. I found it to be an unimportant and self-congratulatory film, the opposite of what Hunger was.

War Horse

What we are seeing lately with critics as much as audiences in 2011 is a kind of rebelling of safe entertainment. If released any other year Steven Spielberg's sappy, patriotic War Horse would be a shoo-in for Best Picture and make more than its fair share of money at the American Box Office. And so the story goes that the reviews were split for Spielberg's WW2 horse epic and its Box Office .. meh. I wouldn't call War Horse a bad film -far from it- its ambitiously epic and lush structure did wonders on me, even when some of its episodic nature could have been trimmed - I didn't need the maudlin story of the French Grandpa and his talkative Granddaughter. Nevertheless Spielberg hasn't lost his chops for great storytelling, he is a visionary and judging by the great movies he has released the last decade -Minority Report, AI, Munich - he hasn't lost much of his famous touch. There's a scene near the end of the film where our beloved Horse runs wild through WW2 wire ravaged fields. It's a horrific scene that hints at darkness and makes you feel the Horses pain as the wires skim through his skin. However, War Horse doesn't belong in the list of great Spielberg's because it feels too familiar, almost too facile an exercise. It feels like a movie that could have won the Oscar 15-20 years ago, yet the times are changing and the way we see movies even more so. Welcome to the new decade of cinema. 2011's best movies were not easily suckered into formula, we are seeing a kind of revolution happening - Terrence Malick's The Tree Of Life and Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive are perfect examples of the new language being created. Spielberg is still stuck in his glory era, which is not to say it's a bad thing but more to say that he hasn't adapted to the times. War Horse is not a risk-taking film and the lack of Awards attention towards it shows just how far we've come and how reward now comes with a price- originality.

The 7 great PIXAR movies

1) WALL-E

2) Ratatouille

3) Finding Nemo

4) The Incredibles

5) Toy Story 3

6) Up

7) Toy Story 2

Lars Von Trier's Apocalyptic vision

I'm a big fan of Lars Von Trier's movies. He's always come across to me as being poetically disturbed, from Breaking The Waves to Dancer In The Dark here's a fearless filmmaker that isn't afraid to push the envelope and make you feel uncomfortable. His latest is no exception, it's called Melancholia and is split into two parts - both completely different in tone and color. It's no surprise too that Von Trier made this film -just like 2009's Antichrist, while going through a sever depression.

The opening credits are stunning, showing a world come to an end via slow motion, painterly photographs and a wagnerian score that continually repeats throughout fractions of the film. These incredible images set the tone for part 2 but let's start with the beginning. The first part is a wedding between two newly weds. In fact it's a train wreck of a wedding. Everything bad that could happen happens. Kirsten Dunst's Justine is the bride and she coincidentally is also going through a severe depression. Why would the groom get married with a severely depressed -and deranged?- woman is beyond me but it's truly interesting and funny how Von Trier mocks his characters, with his audience also knowing that everybody on screen will eventually die.

In a stirringly bizarre scene, Justine leaves her wedding to stare at the stars and there appears glowing shapes of light ala The Tree Of Life on screen. Is it all happening in her head or is Justine seeing things beyond everybody else's comprehension. Later on in the movie she tells her sister "I see things" it's a clue for us to wonder if she actually went through this depression knowing an apocalypse is coming before everyone else did. In the aforementioned credits Justine is seen with lighting bolts eviscerating through her fingers. It's a reminder that what we might perceive as a mentally ill person in the film might not be as ill as we think.

The second part is incredibly hypnotic. The apocalypse is here and yet Justine's sister Christine is told by her oblivious husband -a playful Kiefer Sutherland- that she need not worry, nothing is coming and the mysterious planet Melancholia will just bypass earth. Dunst -knowing death is near- starts coming off her depression and Christine knowing death is near starts going into depression. It's a brilliant switcheroo that proves to us Von Trier has not lost his ability to be a real thinker. He knows how to manipulate then hit his audience hard. His images are memorable and his film a complete work of art.

Melancholia isn't a film for everyone but it is a thinker's movie. Love it or hate it, there is something that is being said here. Von Trier might be a madman but he's not an idiot. He is an auteur first and foremost and attention does need to be paid. In fact this would be a very interesting companion piece to 2011's best movie, Terrence Malick's The Tree Of Life - two totally different works of art but both statements about human nature and creation itself.

Fincher's dark, dreamy "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo"

When I first heard that David Fincher -one of the great modern directors- was going to tackle Stieg Larsson's hugely popular pulp novel The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I held my breath. I mean here's a book that was already adapted as a movie earlier last year in its native tongue of Swedish (My Review can be found HERE) & didn't really need to be followed-up as an American remake. Little did I know Fincher would change things up quite a bit here and make something that is competently watchable even though it does give us a certain sense of deja vu.

Listen up, this film ain't perfect but what Fincher does is consequently change the material he has at hand with his own uniquely dark spin on goth girl power. Rooney Mara gives the female performance of the year as Lisbeth Salander and she is Fincher's muse throughout this movie's close to 160 minute running time. Fincher shoots her with such a keen eye for detail that the murder mystery plot that surrounds the movie is only second to our fiery heroine. It's a character study. Fincher knows Salander is the central interest for viewers and he quenches our thirst.

The eye popping opening credits are hard to describe. Computer cables, naked bodies and dark blood are showcased throughout as Trent Reznor's scorching remake of Zeppelin's Immigrant Song plays in the background. I saw it as a warning to audiences to beware and know the whiplash that is coming, if you can't handle the loud, heavy metaled credits you won't be able to handle the film itself which features rape and graphic violence. Reznor's incredible score follows up the masterful work he did in Fincher's The Social Network late last year.



This is also very much an auteur movie all the way through. Fincher frames his shots and lights his lighting much in the same beautifully obessive way he did in Zodiac and The Social Network. For Fincher, every shot counts, every gesture by Mara is key but -unlike Zodiac- there aren't clues that lie in every frame (a kind of let down for me) just incredibly nasty people that deserve much bad will.

Who are we kidding here, this is pulpy, cryptic stuff that the late Larsson concocted a few years ago in his Stockholm suite. It was bound to rub critics and audiences the wrong way and Fincher knew that all along. The film's flaws show, the sense of deja vu I was talking about earlier is very much present. Fincher can't change everything and has to lay bare with important plot details that have appeared in both the books and the Swedish movies. I can deal with that, cause my heart is with Mara -an incredible talent- and the heart and soul of this nasty movie. I fell in love with the girl and her dragon tattoo.

Rampart

In Rampart Woody Harrelson fucks, shoots, kills his way through law as a corrupt LAPD officer. It's a towering performance that show just how good this 40 year old actor can be. An Oscar nomination is in the waiting. The same can't be said for the movie - which doesn't rank in the same league as recent corrupt cop fare as Narc, Dark Blue or Training Day. The problem? Writer Director Oren Moverman - a former Israeli solider- doesn't really give his movie any real momentum, the material here deserves much more surprise and suspense than it gets. In his earlier film The Messenger, Moverman had enough solid scenes and core storytelling to get past the storytelling flaws, here he doesn't. Harrelson's corrupt cop is a shallow unlikeable man that has had kids with a set of two sisters and pimps his way in bars every night looking for a fuck. He's also in a deep media controversy after beating up a black guy while being secretly taped by a bystander. Moverman doesn't know where to take his movie. It's got a fascinating character at its core yet you're not as hooked to the story as you'd like to be. The subplots with his family are confusing and not properly explained ditto his relationship with his wheel-chair bound brother. Even worse, he has a bar hook up with an attractive sex addict -cleverly played by Robin Wright Penn- that leads to an underdeveloped friendship between the two. It's Harrelson that makes this one worth a look. He gets so under his character's skin that you actually do believe he's as nasty as he looks. It's a high wire act that Harrelson carries home, even when the movie around him falters.

The Adventures Of Tintin

I am an unabashed fan of Steven Spielberg's output of the past -oh say- 10-12 years of work and he's rarely let me down with much of the masterful stuff he's done (I forgive him for The Terminal) but boy was his adaptation of Herge's Tin Tin comic book series a disappointement. There are brilliant flashes in the film's close to 110 minute running time yet Spielberg -and producer Peter Jackson- try to fit too much in the film and don't exactly give the viewer any breathing room. When the film was over I couldn't help but feel hammered down by all the excess. Jamie Bell plays the beloved teenage detective and the motion capture technology that Spielberg uses in the film is the best use yet of this technology. Andy Serkis plays his sidekick captain but doesn't get as much to chew on here as he did in Planet Of The Apes earlier this summer.

The plot is messy and complicated but in short has to do with a kind of Indiana Jones-like mystery involving a hidden treasure and three separate sheets of paper that connect all the plot twists at the end - or something like that. I'll say this, some of the maddeningly kinetic action set pieces do work but what this really looked like to me was Spielberg trying to get back to his old school Raiders Of The Lost Ark Days. Except Spielberg forgot that in that very movie he gave his characters time to breathe and us less of a headache. Indy is a classic of the genre because it revolved around building tension and time throughout its playfully complicated plot. Consider this one not so successful but I'm still looking forward to Spielberg's next film -War Horse .. Coming out in less that 16 days from now.

"Walkabout" and its glorious, forgotten star

Watching Nicolas Roeg's 1977 Australian outback journey Walkabout, I couldn't help but notice its bright eyed young actress Jenny Agutter. She steals every scene with her genuine beauty here, encompassing an otherwise banal and middling story into a kind of meditation on loneliness and sexual repression. Agutter, 25 at the time, wasn't shy to show her entire nude body off on screen. Quite simply known as "Girl" in the movie, she's a guardian to her little brother and muse to an aboriginal guide. She's lost in the outback after her father goes bonkers and puts a bullet in his head out of madness. It's a strange, unexpected scene that perfectly sets up the -rather- slow driving narrative that follows. Agutter is the star here, with her sun soaked freckles, bright eyed optimism and school girl outfit.



The ambiguous ending is rather maddening but strangely fitting to a story that goes nowhere but really does go everywhere in its portrayal isolation and growing up. "Girl" is followed by her little brother through the movie -brilliantly played by Luc Roeg, the director's little brother- we wait for him to whine or moan as the long, arduous journey progresses but he doesn't ditto his sister. They have been sheltered their entire lives and find a new found freedom in the outback with its bewilderingly exotic creatures and biblically passaged landscapes. Agutter is game in every scene. She is the reason to watch Walkabout. Still an actress to this day, Agutter isn't in high budgeted productions but in rather unseen television performances. She is better known to mainstream movie goers as Joanne Simpson in Child's Play 2 but it's Walkabout that is likely her truest work as an artist.



There are sporadically brilliant scenes in Walkabout, yet I felt it did drag. It sought out to get a mood that it did not completely find. But the chutzpah on display is remarkable. Only in the 70's would a studio picture like this get made and only in the 70's -with mad artistic freedom in full display- would you have a scene such as the swimming sequence, which can be semi glimpsed at in some of the photos I've put in this post. It's Miss Gutter's show, she brings eroticism as well as feeling to isolation. I couldn't have liked her more in it.

(side note) I IMDB'ed Agutter right after watching Roeg's film and found out she will have a small part in the upcoming big budgeted Avengers movie due out summer 2012.

The greatest photographed movie?

Here's one movie I'd rank very highly as one of the best photographed ones. Bertolluci's The Conformist as photographed by Vitorio Storaro.


Here the colors used are incredible. Storaro finds a lightedly dark shade that practically matches the Italian actresses dress.

Blue is used very much in the movie. As show in example in the next three images.

This might just be my favorite shot.

And this might just be the sexiest shot. The serpia hue used here brings in a sexiness that Bertolluci was very much looking for in the scene.

Using the forrest to his advantage, Storaro gets the light to come on every corner of the branches in the frame. Just stunning.

Moneyball

I don't really know why it took such a long time for Benneth Miller to make another movie, especially after the triumph that he had with Capote -which dates back to 2005. That's more than 6 years between that film and his newest one Moneyball. I like Capote. It was shot in an incredibly cinematic way and had a great true story to boot. The same can be said of Moneyball which is based on Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane's incredible story, Beane basically reshaped the game of baseball with his sabermetrics system- an original way of drafting and trading his team's players through a computer generated system that some would call a number's game and other's complete bull and sheer luck. I'm with the numbers people. Anyone who loves numbers will probably dig this movie in the way it says the answers lie in the numbers than in the actual game itself. Purists be damned but it's a hell of a ride.

Steven Sodebergh was originally slated as director before he had creative differences with the film's producers. Then came Miller who brings a real sense of vitality to the film. He shoots every frame with the precise markings of a veteran. Sodebergh has kept his screenplay credit but the two main writers here are Aaron Sorkin -The Social Network script wiz- and Steve Zaillan. Sorkin is all over this one. His wit and brash "I'm too good for you" dialogue has not always had me at hello but he does more good than bad with this one. Brad Pitt plays Beane and he is just great, in fact an Oscar nomination awaits Pitt, Jonah Hill as Beane's wiz kid assistant brings incredibly sly comic relief and might get recognized too and wait until you see Phillip Seymour Hoffman as A's Manager Art Howe, he steals every scene he's in. The film is too long at close to 133 minutes -one too many fase endings- and the stuff with Beane, his troubled marriage and his only daughter is the kind of stuff that would have been left off if this wasn't a major studio release. Flaws and all this is the kind of movie Hollywood rarely makes these days, it takes its time to develop fleshed out characters and has incredibly detailed, nuanced scenes.

Midnight In Paris

It took me a while to write about this film but sure enough here I am discussing Woody Allen's frothy, latest picture. A small delight really. It actually pains me to think that this film could get an Oscar Nomination for Best Picture because it really does it an injustice. Midnight In Paris IS in fact Allen's best film since .. I'm not sure when but it's such a small treat that awards seem such a distance away. The present day setting is a dud but the middle is such a transporting treat, in fact I'd go as far as to say that its middle -which has our main protagonist time travelling to a Paris of the 20s and meeting such iconic figures as Gertrude Stein and Hemingway- is the most transporting hour and change of film I've seen all year. Really, Allen just dazzles us with the period setting and he seems much more at home than in the present day sequences, which feel forced and almost trivial. I think this says a lot about Allen's output of late. He has struggled to find a comfort in the present day stories he has presented to us over the past 15-20 years . It seems that it is only when he goes back in time that he actually finds his niche and musings. Allen has played with the past before, his 1985 gem The Purple Rose Of Cairo -part of his incredible run of great movies in the 1980s- was a heartfelt tribute to cinema and its power. Midnight In Paris is Allen back at home and in familiar ground, looking to the past just like he did in Cairo and Radio Days to bring his own self referential humor and grace. I wouldn't out this one near any "Best Picture" category but it's a light and fluff treat at the theatres. I think one of the reasons many critics have gone gaga over this one is because it is Woody and it is an actualy "Good" movie. However, I'd look at his 2001 underrated gem The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion which represents good, modern day Woody and is just as good as this one.

Festival De Nouveau Cinema - Entry # 1

It's always a blast to cover this film fest and just like I did last year, I'll be updating this blog many times in the next few days with my take on some of the hottest titles playing in Canada's oldest film fest, Montreal's Le Festival De Nouveau Cinema. In fact the film fest hasn't even started yet but I was given a few screener DVDs to wet my appetite. At this year's fest I hope to get the same treats as I got last year. Every film fest has its fair share of surprises and this year's edition should be no exception.

The first film I saw was Nadav Lapid's Policeman, an Israeli film that knocked me out for a loop. The film tells of two stories. The first half has to do with Yaron, a hard working Israeli Police Officer with a pregnant wife and a sense of unequivocal fraternity amongst his unit. The second half of the movie is more political - a group of five young Left wing radicals decide to start a revolution to protest the vast difference between Israel's Rich and Poor societies. They want to create a new order in a country they see decimated by poverty. Both stories come together and converge into a thoughtfully carried out finale that consequentially ups the tension a notch. Also showing at the prestigious New York Film Festival, Lapid's film is one like no other. He shoots it with a bracing poet's eye, choosing the right shots and experimenting with the style a little. Here's a small budget movie made into a grandiose cinematic statement, I wouldn't be surprised if more people hear about it in the months to come.

Actress turned director Sarah Polley's followup to her -in my books overrated but- critically acclaimed 2006 debut Away From Here starts off in the same vein as her previous picture, simplistic storytelling and a narrative that doesn't really give us anything new but .. it changes in its last third into a kind of vision I never thought Polley had in her. Take This Waltz is a flawed picture that takes more than its fair share of chances as it goes along. Michelle Williams' Margo is married to a lovable shlub played by Seth Rogen yet she's not contently happy and almost taken aback when she meets the next door neighbour on a business trip and strikes a forbidden chord with him. You know a movie is doing something right when you can relate to some of its characters. The questions Polley raises are valid. Is love enough and worth keeping more than isolated sexual pleasure? Does desire trump love? Williams gives her usual impeccable performance and Rogen is not bad in one of his first dramatic roles. It's a film at war with itself, a kind of schizo mess that doesn't always work but takes chances that make it worth checking out. I think Polley is headed into the right direction but she's still a work in progress.

The Ides Of March

Sometimes the best political thrillers are the ones that strip away the politics for something else surprising and .. cinematic ! The George Clooney directed The Ides Of March is such an example except it never fully realizes what it sets out to do. The schizophrenic pace that Clooney conceives here left me thinking that the writer-director-actor did not really know what kind of movie he really wanted to make. It does have some well made suspense running thought its tightly nit 96 minute running time and excellent performances from a truly talented cast that includes the great Ryan Gosling, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti yet I felt like something was missing. Clooney, never one to shy away from political opinion, takes no prisoners in his account of how torridly corrupt the political process and its players are. Is this news? don't we already know all this? Only the most naive and gullible of people would find all of this surprising. Clooney hammers his message down our throats so much that he commits missteps along the way by devising plot twists that don't make the entire film's potential come through.

Political thrillers have a way to truly suck me into their stories, this one did that at times but not enough to truly call it a solid movie. Clooney has already shown us he's a good director with his Journalism school staple Good Night and Good Luck earning him a few Oscar noms in 2005. In this film he modifies the stylistic approach he brought to that film for a more 70's look. It's no surprise then that he's to have taken some of the classics of that period in time as influences when making this film. His intentions are in the right place yet the story isn't substantial enough to warrant an extraordinary reaction from critics and audiences. The Oscar hopes that were set for the film way back since its initial premiere at the Toronto Film Festival seem to have been pre-matured and not exactly in the right place. Don't get me wrong it's an intriguing project but it didn't live up to its potential.