61. Micmacs (Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
Exhaustively clever, visually wonderful
60. The Killer Inside Me (Winterbottom)
I love Winterbottom and this is a pretty good depiction of the Jim Thompson book which is a nasty piece of work. Didn’t really stay with me, but it keeps you engaged for sure.
59. Looking for Eric (Ken Loach)
Builds up as it goes along to an almost silly climax. I don’t care for sports films or those with imaginary characters as here where Eric Cantona, a great soccer player gives life advice to mailman Eric Bishop. It is Ken Loach. so it feels honest, but a bit silly unless you know the sport, or are British.
58. His & Hers (Ken Wardrop)
Life seen through the faces and voices of women of central Ireland. Full of textures and fabrics and scenery. Girls and women discuss life and love in age squence starting with babies, to little girls, adolescents, young to old women. A wonderful looking and poetic film. Wait for the only man to appear for a few seconds in the last wonderful shot.
57. Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)
56. Tiny Furniture(Lena Dunham)
Another Brooklyn/Manhattan 20-something film shot is a seeming improv style. But this is one of the best – clever and full of life and truth about the age of uncertainty and early adulthood, and about parents. Great writing and boldly acted by the director Lena Dunham
55. Erasing David
Good gimmick. More fun to think about than to sit through.
54. War Don Don (Rebecca Richman Cohen)
A carefully constructed dialectic by this lawyer/filmmaker on the culpability of power for acts of incomprehensible evil. Great footage and access to the trial of leaders and the devastation caused by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone. She carefully draws you in with expectations of guilt and about evil and moves to a cautiously balanced argument on ultimate responsibility and even the appropriateness of the world tribunal itself.
53. I’m Dangerous with Love (Michel Negroponte)
A remarkable, hallucinatory documentary about ibogaine, a psychedelic alkaloid from the West African iboga plant, and its use in curing addiction. The film’s subject “Dimitri” and ex-addict now charismatic shaman is a quite the subject and the film graphically dives into the power of this drug in healing and as revelation. This is way beyond the 60’s idea of a trip. Through the director’s participation, Lisa Croft’s animations, and Dimitri’s journey and initiation to iboga in Gabon, Africa – the film itself get mighty psychedelic. Brave people, brave film.
52. Bass Ackwards (Linus Phillips)
Simple. Poetic. Beautifully shot on a Red Cam. Some nice performances. It’s got a documentary feel, but it’s narrative.
51. Cyrus(Duplass)
The Duplass Brothers get better and better. This one knocks it out of the park. Funny, complex, superior performances by John C Reilly. Jonah Hill, and a great and subtle Marisa Tomei. It’s a coming-of-age, I guess, but I think everyone is coming of age, not just the fleshy and imposing Jonas Hill as Cyrus.
50. Perrier’s Bounty
British gangster genre with all the classic Brit bad guys, particularly Brendan Gleeson as Perrier, Cillian Murphy as the innocent. Well done if this is your cup o’ tea. It’s not mine. Too glib. Dopey characters.

The Extra Man reminds me of one of those odd little European films – probably Danish – populated with oddballs whose lives are nevertheless recognizable. The credibility of these characters is a result of imaginative and committed performances, a great script, and an appreciation that everyone really only gets by performing themselves to one degree or another. Whether you ‘perform’ yourself in public or in private is another matter. Suffice to say Paul Dano’s Louis has some real issues and need to be worked out behind closed doors with lipstick nd a bra on. Kevin Kline’s Henry Harrison, on the other hand, has parleyed his public self into performance art to the point where he doesn’t really have a ‘real’ self that we see anyway; one of those great New York eccentrics. Almost no one has keener comic timing than Kline and he does it here with Shakespearean bravado that never feels too much, going just to the edge of plausibility. There are other wonderful cameos particularly a really sweet Patti D’Arbanville in a tender (tenderizing?) spanking scene, Katie Holmes showing how good she is at comedy, and John C. Reilly doing, well, John C. Reilly plus.
If you want neat conclusions and tidy themes you might leave wanting more, but the directors keep it moving with odd rhythms and unresolved moments. Just seeing how what a great and imaginative a comedian Kevin Kline can be, is worth the admission.

I didn’t know the book or the story. I was even thinking this is too good to be made up. The story is that of Li Cunxin, sixth son of Chinese peasants , living in a small house with twenty of his relatives subsisting on the verge of starvation, who is taken in 1961 at age 11, (because he is of common stock), to serve Madame Mao in reviving the Peking Dance Academy. In 1979, he arrives Texas as part of a cultural exchange, where he finds love, marries, and essentially defects at great risk to his family. It’s a carefully shown clash of ideologies, as well as a coming of age story of triumph, love, and history. Bruce Beresford, who is so good at establishing setting as character moves it along with concise detail and economy. Chi Cao as Li Cunxin is an amazing dancer, plus we get Amanda Schull , from Center Stage, and Bruce Greenwood tastefully understated as the artistic director who discovers him. This is much more than a story of triumph. Li was one of the world’s greatest dancers and the cultural contrasts are not really one sided. Mao’s cultural revolution was brutal. The array of life choices for a gifted artist in America is also daunting. There is lots of great dancing. I was pulled in, even where it intentionally tugs at your heartstrings. A totally enjoyable movie.

Not so different from the Hangover really, just more subtle and adult, less antic, but very funny and insightful. I’m exaggerating. of course, yet the unpleasantness of these flawed characters is really a cover for what they lack and for their own pain. Is that so different from the Hangover!? Of course, this is ten times subtler, and doesn’t have funny Chinese guys, Mike Tyson, kindly strippers, and missing teeth, but it is a film with a willingness not to judge its characters, but to let the audience to do it. Each character is at a moment where their life is about to change, though we may not get to it inside the time of the film leaving we the audience to complete the journey.
These two neighboring New York City families are physically connected through an apartment rental. But spiritually they are all uncomfortable in their own skins. It is literally the skin they wear, the clothes they cover themselves with, spaces and the furniture they inhabit that become motifs woven throughout the story.
Epidermal surfaces become the keys to character. Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is a nurse who performs mammograms all day, which we see in a very funny opening sequence featuring a parade of disembodied breasts. She’s a lump of cynicism and dread but ready for a ray of hope before her dread metastasizes. Her sister, Mary (Amanda Peet) works in a skin salon, tans religiously, is a stunning beauty whose insecurity is bad enough that she finds herself as the unlikely lover of the older, fleshy, Buddha like Oliver Platt. His wife Kate (lanky Katherine Keener) faces another spiritual void, which she hopes to fill by volunteering to any kind of cause, for which she searches the internet. Their daughter Abby, inching into womanhood plagued by skin eruptions, who would be happier if she could just to slip into the skin of a pair of designer jeans pairs. At the farthest end this spectrum is Rebecca and Mary’s mother Andra, whose wrinkled 91 year old surface belies an fully atrophied and cynical soul just waiting for the end.
There is a Buddhist motif on the connectedness and unity of things running through the story. As Buddhists say: “The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances”. ‘Please Give’ is a kind of directive that we accept life its messiness and acknowledge people despite their imperfections. Compassion, mercy, and seeing the most desperate lives without judgment is the film’s larger wisdom.

The first problem for me is I really don’t want to see Kristin Stewart kissing Dakota Fanning. The bigger issue is that movie portraits of rock and roll musicians need to feel organic like the music they make, which emerges the circumstances of their lives. Of course the lives are usually troubled because therein lies the story. You can’t do that with these actresses. We’re reading the performances, not believing the behavior. The whole thing ends up as a series of points to be made; overcoming being chicks; being outsiders; too young for fame; this is your brain on drugs; the disconnect between glamor and rebellion, etc.
I really do like Fanning and Stewart, they sell tickets I suppose, but they come with too much information be credible. Michael Shannon, who I loved in the little seen film, The Missing Person and onstage in New York in Bug plays a ridiculous caricature of their manager Kim Fowley. However absurd he was, he was not just a porno Pygmalion, but a hugely successful entrepreneur of many successful rock acts. It might be interesting, for instance, to see how he co-wrote songs for these girls?
Plastering the soundtrack with Runaways music, if that’s what the soundtrack is, and shooting in a woozy visual style, just doesn’t do much justice to this minor piece of rock history.

45. The Hangover
Never predictable, always politically incorrect, rhythms are way off, and really funny. Great acting, endless quotable, and Mike Tyson to boot. This is the (literally) ‘Arrested Development’ generation of comedy, which in the end has the same anarchist tendencies as the Marx Brothers, just more hormonal. As Tyson says upon seeing these guys antics on his security camera; “Who does shit like that”?

44. Hungry (Steve McQueen)
McQueen, a minimalist video artist, directs a tough, visceral, visual sock in the jaw that follows the human cost to both sides of the Irish conflict. Michael Fassbender commits both body and soul to this performance as Bobby Sands, a fighter for the Irish Republican Army, whose death in 1981 from a prison hunger strike led to a surge of IRA recruitment and global media attention. It artfully does the job of putting us into this significant historical moment at a tangible human level. Like Julian Schnabel, the director’s strong visual sense, but with his own unique ability to draw out substantial performances from the entire cast, allow us to discover spiritual moments inside the film’s grim visuals.
For other unique depictions of the pain and irreconcilable passions ignited by the Irish/British Protestant/Catholic conflict in Ireland I also recommend Oliver Hirschbiegel’s” Five Minutes of Heaven with Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, or Ken Loach’s “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”. From the ballad of that same name:

43. Red, White, and Blue
By end of this movie you will be speechless. Not for the squeamish. You may ask yourself why even make a film this violent and nihilistic. But on reflection the violence is mostly not graphic (except for one really wrenching moment) and, like No Country For Old Men, it cuts (pardon the pun) to the sad core of a violent country where there are lives worse than the damaged ones we confront here. The people are common, recognizable, the tension builds and builds until it is almost unbearable. Like Audition, or Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer, you’ll be thinking about it for a while. The film is technically skilled and the performances frighteningly committed. Director Simon Rumley has fashioned an American horror classic with style. It is the heart of American darkness

42. Grindhouse
Selective, but useful history. I used to see these in Times Square. I have the book, too. Interesting alternative history with lots of clips.

41. Mother (Madeo – Joon-ho Bong)
This will really grow on you. Details accumulate and it doesn’t go where you think it will go. By the you realize that you’ve seen a really masterful piece of storytelling.

40. L’Affaire Farewell
True story well told

39. Greenberg
I loved it. Greta Gerwig is a personal favorite and is as charming as always, and Stiller eliminates all the pleasantness from his comic performance, which is brave and sometimes heard to watch. Behavior you recognize will make you squirm. I’m really glad I’m not 25, or even 35 again.

38. Vincere
37. The Green Zone (Paul Greengrass)
Disguised as a spy-ish thriller, Matt Damon and the director use the chase and suspense elements of their Bourne movies to tell a fictional story that uses very real facts about the scam that was called Shock and Awe. It’s blatant what they’re doing: we get the exciting Greengrass hand held style, and are reminded how we, American public, were duped about WMD’s at the enormous expense to both Iraq and to our own armed forces. It’s sad and inevitable how the lives of small people, not only don’t add up to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but are at the mercy historical forces about which we can do nothing. A sobering reminder of the Bush legacy, and of why Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their ilk can sit back and laugh at the blood on their hands.

34. Crazy Heart
Most admirable as a well developed Indie product. A relaxed and committed performance form Bridges, whose Oscar comes from a lifetime of these parts and for singing good. 30% too much cliche, but every 5 years a good singing actor plays a breaking down musician and it’s always fun. See my review for the faux sequel above.

33. Reykjavik-Rotterdam (Iceland-Óskar Jónasson)
A blend of the ‘one last job’ caper, with neatly placed humor, a snappy pace, lots of double crossing, and a layer of family drama. Baltasar Kormákur has a Colin Farell vibe which ennobles the otherwise hapless Kristófer – an parolee forced by desperate circumstances into once last smuggling job aboard a freighter from – you got it – Reykjavik-Rotterdam and back. Antics and violence ensue, but you don’t have to keep track of the usual ‘caper’ details and it moves at a swift clip between the ship, where Kristófer’s ex-buddies are helping with the task and fighting off the skeptical captain, and the shore, where his wife is being threatened by her dastardly ex-boyfriend. Kormákur could be an international star and is already a successful director in Iceland. He also owns the rights and is in to the sequel already underway featuring Mark Wahlberg. That’s not bad casting for this part, but the screening I saw is obviously to attract interest in the original before it’s packaged up with fancier locations, big stars, and no subtitles. But get this one while you can.

32. A Prophet (French-Jacques Audiard)
This is one tough movie. Tahar Rahim is just amazing as he evolves from a naive prisoner to clever street smart errand boy during his ‘work release’. Complex interplay of gang and Corsicans and Muslim politics that I would need explained, but that doesn’t detract from strong realistic filmmaking. 150 minutes flies by. So different from the director’s film The Venus Beauty Institute and worthy of that Academy nomination.

31. Ghost Writer (Polanski)
The director is in his paranoid thriller mode. It’s set on the Vineyard as duplicated somewhere in Germany, so that’s fun for us Bay Staters. The pivotal suspense scene by GPS is an interesting device and the film is full of odd, quirky, dry moments like that. As for it feeling a little off center – bike rides in the rain, a reappearing Asian deck sweeper, befuddling story details – it’s not so much that plot points are confusing, as they are laid out to be discovered, possibly not even noticed on a first viewing, and are constructed to keep us unsettled. Details may be McGuffins, they maybe significant, they may simply appear sinister. It’s a network of paranoid situations and moments, like The Tenant as a conspiracy drama. Of course, in the movie, as with Polanski’s life, the paranoia is actual and merciless.