Author: Village Vidiot

Very weird, David Cronenberg film based on JG Ballard novel of the same name about sexual fetisihization of cars and car crashes. Well acted with Holly Hunter, James Spader, Elias Kotae, but very flat in style and presentation. Explicitly sexual, yet strangely detached and unerotic. Sex, death, and car crashes. Not a lot of fun…

Very solid 2010 Ben Affleck directed/starring film about bank and armored car robberies in Charlestown, MA. Atmospheric. Excellent work from Jeremy Renner as the borderline psycho member of Affleck’s crew and the one who forces him to do the ‘one last job’ that’s always the problem. In this case, a very big job. Nice work…

Very smart, funny, unsettling, interesting, playful, well acted, and well written and directed film (John Roos) about a 16-year old girl (Christina Ricci) wise and cruel beyond her years, who leaves her Louisiana home and mother and journeys to live with and exploit her gay brother (Martin Donovan) in Indiana. She steals his lover (Ivan…

Very silly, sometimes funny, sometimes dumb kung fu movie that’s fun to watch but all empty calories. I mean, I enjoyed it, but I don’t know why everyone raved about it so much

Very rough, good, occasionally funny and nasty dark comedy from the director of “Welcome to the Dollhouse”. The most dysfunctional family in town. Mother and father (Louise Lasser and Ben Gazarra) are divorcing, one daughter is a successful modern feminist poet who knows (feels) she’s a fraud. Her neighbor is a repressed telephone harrasser. Daughter…

Very nice little Mike Leigh film about a playful and rather zany 30-yo elementary school teacher in England (Sally Hawkins in a lovely turn as Poppy). You follow her teaching, her efforts to bring joy to the world and her growth as a caring and understanding person. Amazing interactions with her deranged, paranoid and very…

Very nice little Canadian film with Helena Bonham Carter playing a rather wacky Cape Breton girl who marries an ex-miner. Still, it’s a tad soft in the pacing and writing, and much is never explained. Very much the story of the women/widows and children of the miners. Nicely acted and painful at the end. Death…

Very interesting, rough film about the drug trade. Well done in some settings, less well in others. The parts played in Mexico and San Diego are really cool. The other pieces shot in Cincinnati are less interesting. Michael Douglas is, once again, rather boring and overly sincere as the antidrug czar with the junkie daughter….

Very interesting piece about Alan Ginsburg (well played by James Franco) and the obscenity trial surrounding the beat poem that fused the profane and the profound in the 1950s and set a new style of poetry before the public. A mix of trial transcripts, interviews brought to life, and animation. All the principals do wonderful…

Very interesting look at Tolstoy’s last days as his wife and his disciples battle over control of his writings. Superb and affecting work by Christopher Plummer as Tolstoy and Helen Mirren as the Countess Sofya (I can’t even begin to describe the crush I have on her). I was a bit disconnected from Paul Giamatti’s…

Very interesting Atom Etgoyan film about the making of an historical film about the Armenian genocide that is itself fraught with half-truths and outright falsehoods to make the larger point about the masking of the genocide. It also chronicles the modern legacy of the acts and their proximate ones, as in the short and unhappy…

Very good, very intense, dark, dark Danish comic drama about an intensely dysfunctional family. A birthday party for the pater familias. falls apart when one of the children speaks truth to power and unveils the family’s dirty secrets. A fascinating, often perversely funny, family and national drama, including wonderful side notes on racism. See this…

Very good Woody Allen film starring Sean Penn as Emmett Ray, the fictional second best jazz guitarist of the 1930s. Always chasing the image of Django Reinhart, he struggles against himself, women, and life. Success is followed by his simply falling from view. This is a fine movie, not deep, a bit sour, but good.

Very good film by Steven Sodderberg about a British ex-con trying to figure out and avenge his daughter’s murder. Fine acting and production by Terrence Stamp and Peter Fonda. Set in LA. Wonderful, creative use of old clips of Stamp from his first film “Poor Cow” by Ken Loach. Very nice support work by a…

Very good film about two young girls who come, by chance, to know one another. They move in together and begin to share lives. They become involved with some very interesting bikers and one takes up with a middle-class user of women who twists her head around completely. Well acted. See this one!

Very good drama about a young mother’s affair with a blouse salesman during summer 1969 at a lower-middle class Catskillls resort. Fun soundtrack, thoughtful humane dealing with the problematics of liberation and responsibility. Well worth seeing. Set in the context of the moonwalk and Woodstock. See this one. Nicely acted, rather funny, with a nice…

Very good action flick about four US soldiers going after the gold stolen from Kuwait by Sadamm Hussein during the Gulf War. Good work by George Clooney, Ice Cube, Marc Wahlberg, and Spike Joynz. Good critique of US policy and Bush. Fine camera work, interesting weirdness about wounds. An antiwar action flick, it does not…

Very funny, intelligent, scary look at a very bizarre multiple murder-kidnapping for hire tale from the Coen Brothers. Very much about the Midwest and Minnesota in particular. Fine work by all the actors, especially Steve Buscemi and Francis McDormand (an Oscar). Stylish, nasty, and fun. See this film!

Very funny, good film about 6 English steelworkers who lose their jobs in downsizing and the death of their trade in Sheffield. They turn to stripping in a wonderful little film that looks at male views of their own bodies, sex, age, race, class, gender, and lots more. The Americans may try to clone this…

Very funny film about an adopted man (Ben Stiller) searching for his bio parents. Mary Tyler Moore, Alan Alda, George Segal, Lily Tomlin, Susanne Arquette, Tea Leone, and other excellent actors. Excellent work all the way around

Very funny animated comedy about an ogre who sets out to save a princess to protect his land from an evil noble. Celebrity voices. This thing works for kids and adults. Really quick and playful

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, small film about class, gender, love, aloneness, and America. Wendy is a young woman driving from Indiana to Alaska where, she hears, they need people. She has little money as she reaches a depressed little city in Oregon. She’s arrested for shoplifting, her car dies, and she loses her dog Some people help…

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 fine film about the ‘campaign’ to remove Augusto Pinochet as dictator of Chile Rene’ (Gael Garcia Bernal). is hired/recruited to consult/run/be part of the campaign to vote no on the Chilean dictatorship. He’s a young, American-inspired ad man in the age of the weird Coke commercials; you remember, the ones with the mimes?. Old…