Author: Village Vidiot

We both really loved this Best Foreign Film Oscar winner from Michael Haneke (“The White Ribbon,”. “Cache”). What are the limits of love?. When is what we call love wrong and destructive?. Amazing acting from Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert follows the crisis of love in action after Riva’s Anne has a stroke and…

We both really liked this small, sweet Irish musical about a street musician (Glenn Hansard, lead singer for The Frames) who is a fine songwriter. He meets Marketa Irglova as a lovely immigrant street salesperson of talent, taste, and charm. They write songs and sing them. They write songs alone; they write them together. They…

We both really liked this 1995 Richard Linklater piece about Jessie (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) who meet on a train going to Vienna. They ‘click’ and she agrees to get off and spend the night with him, and what a night it is. Nothing insanely out of the ordinary just real, good, playful,…

We both really enjoyed this quirky, understated, black-and-white comic/tragi look at an elderly Montana working man, Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) who comes to believe that he’s won a million dollars in a sweepstakes and needs to go to Lincoln, Nebraska to collect it He’s a tough old bird, an alcoholic, and his long-suffering sons and…

We both really enjoyed this 2009 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film. A young cellist loses his job when his orchestra dissolves. He and his wife leave Tokyo and return to the distant city of his youth. Searching for work, he answers an ad that he thinks is for a travel agent, but it turns…

We both liked this interesting film about the off-the-grid, bayou-dwelling underclass living in the fens off the coast of LA. A young girl raised by her hard-drinking father who is ill. Hurricanes, imaginary animals and images of the melting polar icecaps link it all together. Very well acted by some pros, some amateurs. Fantasy and…

We both enjoyed and were disappointed in this film version of the Broadway musical about an overweight girl becoming a teen dance star and fighting racism on TV in 1962 Baltimore. Based on John Waters’s classic comedy, the musical has some good, nasty songs but, in the end, I just felt like something was off….

We both appreciated and liked Ben Affleck’s directorial debut in this adaptation from a Dennis Lehane novel set and filmed in Dorchester. Lots of local color and folk acting in this one about the disappearance of a little girl. A very good movie, very well acted with real ambiguity and ambivalence about the story. Fine…

We all really liked this well-regarded 2009 film from Jason Reitman about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) a professional HR hitman who is hired to fire employees He knows it’s a cruel system, but he loves his work with its complete lack of connection to others. He lives on planes and in hotels. He treasures his…

We all really liked this silly pirate/ghost story/costume drama. Johnny Depp is wonderful, inspired actually, as pirate captain Jack Sparrow, Geoffrey Rush works well as his nemesis, the captain of the ghost ship. The romantic characters are ok. It’s worth seeing despite the totally silly ending/epilogue. I found the special effects a bit intrusive and…

We all liked this scary/funny Robin Williams piece based loosely on the children’s book. Very frightening visuals but also enough fun to keep the kid in it and let her know it’s a film. The story examines a supernatural game with horrible results. It also looks at family, love, and friendship. Worth seeing

We all liked this Sandra Bullock film about Michael Oher, the Baltimore Ravens tackle who was adopted by a family as a homeless youth. Worth seeing. Bullock just won the Golden Globe for best actress for this one [Later won the Oscar. Why?]

We all liked this interesting Pixar animated film about a robot become sentient after seven hundred + years of trash compacting on the now deserted, polluted, trash laden earth. The citizens have gone off into space (at least those who could). A new bot, EVE, comes to earth searching for life and finds just that,…

We all (B, b, and I) liked this painful but very interesting study of Robert Kearns (Greg Kinnear), the engineer who successfully developed the intermittent wiper system only to have it stolen by Ford and used by every other manufacturer. He is obsessive and not an especially lovable individual despite being in the right. That’s…

We (well, I, Bronwen fell asleep) enjoyed this sly, low-key Lars Von Trier Danish comedy about an actor hired to play the boss no one’s met by the real boss who, for ten years, has masqueraded as a worker at a Danish IT company. He brings in the self-absorbed, silly actor, Kristofer, to be the…

Watched while recovering from knee surgery. Really hot outside. Innocuous romantic comedy with Steve Carrell as Cal Weaver, married to Emily (Julianne Moore) who informs him over dinner that she wants a divorce and then informs him she’s had an affair. He moves out and is taught by Jacob (Ryan Gosling) how to be a…

Watched this Oscar-winning message biopic about Al Gore and global warming at home and liked it, to the extent that one can feel pleasure about such issues. Everyone should see this film, even if you’re already on board with the ideas (as we are). Still…. As a friend remarked, where is the discussion of the…

Watched this again with the kid for the first time since 1981 or 2. We all loved it, although the little one found it rather scary. I was much more tolerant of the romantic fantasy elements of the thing this time (the flying) and much more aware of the Peter Pan hook. It’s a very…

Violent, thoughtful, disturbing, long (155 min), well-made and challenging look at a 19-yo, illiterate Franco-Arab who enters prison in France on a 6-yr bit and finds himself played, used, and abused by Corsican and Muslim criminals alike. He makes his own way in this mess, always the “Dirty Arab” to the Corsicans he serves in…

Very well done, if rose colored, look at the porn industry of the 1970s and 80s with fine acting, especially by Burt Reynolds as a mephestophlian director, although the whole cast is really good. Marky Mark surprises and I always love William Macy. Glosses over the exploitation and physical and psychological abuse of women and…

Very well done, disturbing documentary about a platoon’s tour of duty. in Afghanistan. We don’t have a clue about what the hell we’re doing and why we’re doing it Amazing. The loss of US and Afghan lives, treasure, reputation, meaning, etc is simply mind-boggling. Was there ever any hope?. It was clearly compromised in year…

Very well acted story of Teena Brandon, aka Brandon Teena, a ftm ts in the Great Plains region. A bad end to be sure. Wonderfully acted, especially by Hillary Swank as Brandon (an Oscar) and Chloe Sevingny as her girl friend. But from what I’ve heard, not all that accurate. She is, of course, murdered…

Very strong film with Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Geoffrey Rush (the man who can do anything in film!), and Judy Dench along with a fine supporting cast including Ben Affleck (the weakest of the bunch—its always a Yank). This is a lovely (if excessively complete and resolved) conceit by Tom Soppard (he of Rosencrantz and…

Very stagy, and we thought, pretentious, 1995 Greek drama about life, death, history, and the perpetual crises of the Balkans. Bronwen and I were both bored by the film and shut it down after about 40 ponderous minutes. The thought of dealing with the remaining two-and -a-half hours was more than we could bear. On…

Very unsatisfying American ripoff of the Norwegian one. It has to be neatly sown up at the end, whereas the European version has all sorts of ambiguity built into it. Pacino and Williams are ok, if predictable. Hilary Swenk is fun to watch.