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Blue Valentine (2010): B-
Magnificent performances elevate mundane Cassavetes-esque material in Blue Valentine, a simultaneous portrait of a marriage’s undoing and inception. Charting the day-of-disintegration for jack-of-no-trades Dean (Ryan Gosling) and nurse Cindy (Michelle Williams), as well as flashing back to their initial courtship, Derek Cianfrance’s film boasts a pair of lead turns to swoon over, with Gosling and…
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Another Year (2010): B+
After an ever-so-slight reprieve with Happy-Go-Lucky, Mike Leigh returns to full-fledged miserablism with Another Year. Schematically split into seasonal segments – and beginning with Spring so that funereal Winter might naturally conclude the grim proceedings – Leigh’s latest concerns a cheery couple, geological engineer Tom (Jim Broadbent) and counselor Gerri (Ruth Sheen), and their recurring…
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The Illusionist (2010): B
Working from an original script by the late Jacques Tati, Sylvain Chomet follows up The Triplets of Belleville with The Illusionist, the somber tale of an aging French magician and the young girl with whom he strikes up an unlikely friendship. Traveling about 1950s Europe performing low-rent gigs in theaters, pubs and anywhere else that…
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Somewhere (2010): B
Somewhere opens with the sight of movie star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) driving his black Ferrari around and around a circular track – a visual encapsulation of his repetitive go-nowhere life, as well as of writer/director Sophia Coppola’s habitual return to favored themes and imagery. In this companion piece to Lost in Translation, Johnny spends…
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The Father of My Children (2010): B
The Father of My Children plays like two separate but related films grafted together, and though it segues smoothly from one to the other, there’s nonetheless a frustrating inconsistency to Mia Hansen-Løve’s drama. Her story’s opening half focuses on Grégoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), husband to Sylvia (Chiara Caselli), father to three loving daughters, and a…
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TRON (1982): C-
While fantasy films all require some suspension of disbelief, they’re nonetheless required to operate logically within their conceit’s framework. That’s a rule ignored by TRON, which sets up a premise – a computer programmer gets beamed into a computer, where he discovers an Orwellian world populated by people-like programs – that seems to make up…
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Rabbit Hole (2010): C
Rabbit Hole is filled with the anger and inconsolable grief of parents who’ve lost a young child, messy emotions that never manage to disrupt the phony tidiness of John Cameron Mitchell’s carefully arranged drama. An about-face from his prior Shortbus, Mitchell’s film – written by David Lindsay Abaire, based on his Pulitzer-winning play – picks…
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Secret Sunshine (2007): A-
An exemplary examination of coping that expands to entail questions of morality, absolution and faith, Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine is a masterwork of incisive melodrama. Opening to a shot of a clear blue sky that’s ultimately juxtaposed by a haunting image of a garbage-strewn dirt patch, Lee’s film concerns Shin-ae (Cannes best actress winner Jeon…
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Our Beloved Month of August (2010): B
Part fictional drama, part documentary, part concert film – Our Beloved Month of August doesn’t so much blend disparate genres as collapse them into a uniquely evocative collage, albeit one that remains something of a detached formal exercise. The first half of Miguel Gomes’ sophomore effort (after 2003’s The Face You Deserve) purports to be…
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Inside Job (2010): B+
Inside Job doesn’t elucidate much about the 2008 American (and subsequent global) economic collapse that couldn’t have been gleaned from regular newspaper reading over the past two years. That simply means, however, that Charles Ferguson’s documentary is merely an exhaustively infuriating recap of the causes and effects of our country’s three decade-commitment to financial deregulation.…
