Author: Village Vidiot

Very fine, weird and demanding conceit of a movie about a man who loses his short-term memory in a horrible rape of his wife. Was she murdered?. He thinks/knows so. But he knows so as he tattoos his body with the clues he thinks he needs to hunt down the killers. In the process he…

Very fine, inspirational film we watched with B4 although she seemed bored by the whole thing. Wonderfully acted and inspiring story of the British athletes of the 1920 Olympics, and especially the evangelist and the Jewish sprinter. Worth seeing regularly.

Very creative, non-linear story from director Felix von Groeningen. Didier (Johan Heidenbergh) is a Belgian artist and former punk who plays banjo in, of all things, a bluegrass band. He meets Elise (Verlee Baetens) a tattoo artist with her own shop. Their love and relationship is playful and musical as he takes her into his…

Very brutal, well done piece of work Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning performance as Aileen Wournous, the profoundly damaged serial killer. She punishes men for the horrible abuses that frame her life. Her messed up affair with the naïve Selby Wall (Christina Ricci) is a caricature of male modeling. The prostitute turned provider becomes a mass murderer…

Traditional and very effective boxing film from Ron Howard that shows the life and travail of James J Braddock, heavyweight champion of the world. It is a fundamentally conservative film starring Russell Crowe that ‘rejects’ collective action by workers. It also is a well made and good film that works on its own terms, pitting…

Too stylish and predicatble for my taste. This look at British eccentrics set right by a happy go lucky girl in the twenties won the critics’ hearts but not mine. Maybe it plays better on the big screen

Tony Gilroy’s (director/writer) follow-up to the Bourne series, this one concentrates on the lone survivor of the CIA’s parallel, simultaneous operations designed to build “better” operatives but undone in part by Bourne’s survival It takes Aaron Cross, a soldier modified virally to be s more successful killer, as he tries to find the drugs he…

Tommy Lee Jones stars in this unusual story of western retribution. When his friend Melquiado is killed (not accidentally but not for the reason originally thought) by a border guard, Pete (Jones) kidnaps the guard and takes him and, retrieving the corpse, journey’s to Mexico to force him to confront his crime. What a road…

Tom Hanks plays James Donovan, a NY insurance attorney asked to represent Soviet spy Rudolph Abel (Mark Rylance) in this based-on-a-true story Steven Spielberg tale of Cold War intrigue and double dealing which, in part due to Donovan’s skill, led to Abel’s exchange for Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot captured by the USSR after…

Todd Haynes period romantic melodrama (1952-53) stars the wonderful Kate Blanchett as the wife/mother title character in an unhappy marriage, and chronicles her affair with Therese Belivet (Roony Mara), a talented, artistic photographer earning her living as a department store clerk It follows the characters through Carol’s divorce, their road trip flight away from the…

Thoughtful and interesting look at conflict in a Catholic school in the Bronx in 1964 when a priest (Seymour Philip Hoffman) is seen by the head nun ( Meryl Streep in a fine turn) as getting too close and behaving inappropriately with a student. Based on the Pulitze Prize-winning play by John Patrick Shanley. Very…

This was an interesting documentary on the pluses and minuses of building/working on Boston’s first real ‘green/environmental’ building, a luxury apt building in Southie, Boston. Good takes of workers, contradictions of local and global inputs.

This was a wonderful way for Harry Dean Stanton to go out as an actor, and he knew it. It was clearly a love letter to and also about him. Set in the desert somewhere, Stanton plays Lucky, a WWII Navy vet who served on LSTs at the Battle of Okinawa. Not surprisingly, so did…

This very funny, crude black date comedy really is worth seeing despite its reliance on sex and poop jokes. A good run at self-criticism by African-American comics

This very funny David Mamet version of Trufaut’s “Day for Night” works as a troupe of actors descends on a small NH town to make a film. Led by their director William Macy, they include a pedaphile, Alec Baldwin, and a shy leading lady, Sarah Jessica Parker, plus an idealistic author, Seymour Hoffman. Funny work…

This two-part Lars Van Triers effort looks at two sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsborough) as they both face their world ending through marriage (Dunst) and the mystery blue planet, Melancholia (all) that threatens the world in the second part. Wonderful acting from John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Alexander Skarsgard, and Kiefer Sutherland. This…

This thoughtful, beautiful and harsh Columbian film written and directed by Ciro Guerra, chronicles the journey of Octavio. Corrillo (Marciano Martinez, a renowned singer) a former troubadour and singer of vallenato, the lyric ballads of love, life and death in rural northeastern Columbia. He sets out on Ash Wednesday to return his accordion following the…

This Singaporian film (Anthony Chen’s debut feature), is the first from that nation to win an award at Cannes (Camera D’Or). It is a lovely, unsentimental—but not cold—look at the relationship between a difficult 10-year old boy whose hardworking parents are not home (the Chinese title, The Parents Are Not At Home) and the Philippina…

This rough film from Clint Eastwood stars Angelina Jolie as a mother in 1928 whose son disappears. She is desperate to get him back. The police substitute another kid. Indeed, the institutional corruption of the police is a key theme in the movie and is handled very well. It should feed into “Chinatown”. John Malkovitch…

This review is dedicated to the memory of Roger Ebert who died yesterday: on your work, one thumb very up!. Sixto Rodriguez’s two albums came and went from the music scene during the early 1970s without making a ripple here. With Dylan-esque lyrics, pacing like Tim Hardin, and a voice reminiscent of Tim Buckley, he…

This quirky and very playful John Cusak vehicle looks at the life of the owner of a vinyl music store in Chicago. Good tunes as it chronicles his relentless failures in love. The people who patronize and work in the store are priceless, the women are great (Lily Taylor is wonderful!) and the movie works….

This Pixar/Disney look at childhood, its normal but real traumas, memory, and the functioning of the mind is often funny, kind, and astoundingly top 10%- if not 5%-income oriented. It brings us Riley’s attempt to cope with a new and ‘challenging’ setting that disrupts her perfect Minnesota world of family (two-parent household with a mom…

This Oscar-winner (2005 Best Foreign Film) is in Sosha. Set in the townships of Johannesburg, it is a relentlessly painful look at the degradation of David, nee Tsotsi (thug). Abused as a boy by his brutal father and forced to desert his mother as she dies of AIDS, he runs away to the streets and…

This Oscar-nominated treat merges wonderful black-and-white visuals of human actors with incredibly creative animation featuring the artwork in Van Gogh’s style of 200 artists who hand painted each animated frame. This is a fine visual piece that chronicles the last days of Vincent Van Gogh and offers an alternative to the standard story of his…

This Martin Lawrence action comedy had a great premise but it fails utterly to pull it off. ML plays a jewel thief who gets out of jail after a robbery gone terribly wrong and wants to find the loot only to discover he stashed it in a building that became a police station. How to…