Inspector Bellamy (2009)
Filmmaker(s): Claude Chabrol
A well known Parisian inspector becomes involved in an investigation while on holiday.
The Beach (I) (2000)
Somewhere on this planet it must exist.
Filmmaker(s): Danny Boyle
Twenty-something Richard travels to Thailand and finds himself in possession of a strange map. Rumours state that it leads to a solitary beach paradise, a tropical bliss - excited and intrigued, he sets out to find it.
10 Feb The Beach (I) (2000)
Exotic Adventures For me, when a film fails to engage me by itself, I jump up a level, in this case making it a chapter in the movie of the life of Danny Boyle. I like the guy. I like his instincts. He envisions worlds...
Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005)
The family that eats together stays together.
Filmmaker(s): Sion Sono
A teenager named Noriko Shimabara runs away from her family in Toyokawa, to meet Kumiko, the leader of an Internet BBS, Haikyo.com. She becomes involved with Kumiko's family circle, which grows darker after the mass suicide of 54 high school girls.
10 Feb Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005)
The Magical Inbetweens Magical spaces in Hispanically influenced films are easy to locate. We as viewers find it easy to place ourselves there it seems natural. Only Medem challenges. There are three similarly structured magical traditions in modern Japanese films, and I find them tantalising,...
Snow Cake (2006)
Filmmaker(s): Marc Evans
A drama focused on the friendship between a high-functioning autistic woman and a man who is traumatized after a fatal car accident.
10 Feb Snow Cake (2006)
Brain Freeze Sometimes the folding is just too contrived. It panders, insults with its obviousness. Here we have a professional man, who in a car accident loses the child he has but has never met. The story arranges for compound suffering. Then we have the...
The Tree of Life (2011)
Nothing stands still.
Filmmaker(s): Terrence Malick
The impressionistic story of a Texas family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father. Jack finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith.
10 Feb The Tree of Life (2011)
Connected Paths I’ve been studying Chinese calligraphy in the context of the cinematic life. 1300 years ago, Chinese poet-theorists had the notion that layered expression, perhaps with four layers or more, was the purest expression possible. The first of these layers come with the ideograms:...
Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981)
Filmmaker(s): Emir Kusturica
A young man grows up in Sarajevo in the 1960s, under the shadow of his good, but ailing father, and gets attracted by the world of small-time criminals.
10 Feb Do You Remember Dolly Bell? (1981)
The Lost First Time Kusturica is something of a challenge for me to parse. The experience is a bit troubling because it seems so genuine that we should be ashamed for intruding. He does not seem to accomplish this by ordinary means. Yes, the acting...
Happythankyoumoreplease (2010)
Go Get Yourself Loved
Filmmaker(s): Josh Radnor
Captures a generational moment - young people on the cusp of truly growing up, tiring of their reflexive cynicism, each in their own ways struggling to connect and define what it means to love and be loved. Six New Yorkers juggle love, friendship, and the keenly challenging specter of adulthood. Sam Wexler is a struggling writer who's having a particularly bad day. When a young boy gets separated from his family on the subway, Sam makes the questionable decision to bring the child back to his apartment and thus begins a rewarding, yet complicated, friendship. Sam's life revolves around his friends — Annie, whose self-image keeps her from commitment; Charlie and Mary Catherine, a couple whose possible move to Los Angeles tests their relationship; and Mississippi, a cabaret singer who catches Sam's eye.
10 Feb Happythankyoumoreplease (2010)
Shorted Out If you live the life in films that I do, you will be offended when a filmmaker takes his responsibilities lightly. That is what I felt when watching this. The writer of the thing has made himself the central character: a writer who...
Argo (2012)
The movie was fake. The mission was real.
Filmmaker(s): Ben Affleck
As the Iranian revolution reaches a boiling point, a CIA 'exfiltration' specialist concocts a risky plan to free six Americans who have found shelter at the home of the Canadian ambassador.
09 Feb Argo (2012)
Will’s Good Hunting It has been a month since I have seen this and I am struggling to write a comment, because of what I know I will see in another CIA-supported movie: Bigelow’s movie about Bin Laden. All movies bring history into the story,...
Rubber (2010)
Are you TIRED of the expected?
Filmmaker(s): Quentin Dupieux
A group of people gather in the California desert to watch a "film" set in the late 1990s featuring a sentient, homicidal car tire named Robert. The assembled crowd of onlookers watch as Robert becomes obsessed with a beautiful and mysterious woman and goes on a rampage through a desert town.
09 Feb Rubber (2010)
Erasure I have a hard time with films like this. On the one hand, it explicitly deals with concepts that attract me. It is very clever and well enough put together. But there is balance between art meant to affect you and essays about the...
Colombiana (2011)
Revenge is beautiful.
Filmmaker(s): Olivier Megaton
After witnessing her parents’ murder as a child in Bogota, Cataleya Restrepo grows up to be a stone-cold assassin. She works for her uncle as a hitman by day, but her personal time is spent engaging in vigilante murders that she hopes will lead her to her ultimate target: the mobster responsible for her parents' death.
