Village Vidiot

We enjoyed this comedy with Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Matthew Broderick,. Casey Affleck, and Alan Alda about a group of workers and former workers in a NYC apartment who work to get their money back after Alda’s Charles Shaw steals their life savings in a Ponzi scheme. There are some very funny moments, and the…

We enjoyed this banksy production (a documentary, a mockumentary? I’m not sure which) about Mr Brain Wash, aka Thierry, an obsessive videographer used clothing salesman from LA (French immigrant) who chronicled the street art scene as part of his obsession and then, with no talent, joined it successfully, mounting a show and selling millions of…

We enjoyed this 6th installment in the series, although I was more underwhelmed than Bronwen. She didn’t read the book. The settings are all fine, the quiditch is exceptional, the acting is adequate (although Dumbledore is too sweet in this one, he’s actually quite distant, curt, and even cold and obsessed with his epic quest…

We enjoyed and appreciated Todd Haynes stylized homage to Douglas Sirk’s message films from the fifties, although it turned that decade into a caricature rather than a period inhabited by real people. And we were real people. The film follows a wife’s (Julianne Moore) struggle to deal with the husband’s (Dennis Quaid) homosexuality. It also…

We enjoyed and appreciated this tale of loss and love from India and Australia. Five-year old Sarroo (Sunny Pawar) from an impoverished Indian village family accompanies his brother on a scavenging mission and becomes separated from him and inadvertently winds up over a thousand miles away after becoming locked on a moving train. He doesn’t…

We both were fascinated by this brutal Paul Thomas Anderson character study of greed and falsehood based very loosely on Upton Sinclair’s “Oil”. Starring Daniel Day Lewis in a brilliant star turn (Oscar, 2008, Best Actor) as the obsessed oil man, Daniel Plainview, the film chronicles the similarities between capital and religion and the cultural…

We both survived this brutal Mexican look at a society literally going to the dogs. Three interlocking stories geared around a car crash and dogs all take one into the brutalities of modern Mexico, its connection to cynicism and lost radicalism, tradition recreation (dog fighting) and modern punk gangsterism among the lumpen, love and arrogance…

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 funny if slow-moving and poignant Norwegian movie with an unlikely premise. Swedish home economists are studying the movements of folks to try to design better kitchens. To do this, they position ‘recorders’ who track the movements of people throughout the day. In this case, they set a rather lonely single…

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 Wes Anderson confection about M Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) concierge of the hotel and Zero Mustafa (Tony Revolori/F Murray Abraham) a refugee who becomes the new lobby boy and his devoted friend and companion. Very funny story of a struggle over a family fortune, art theft, love, baking (check the short…

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 offbeat indie film starring Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, and Patricia Clarkson. Lars (Gosling) is a socially isolated young man in Minnesota who lives in his brother and pregnant sister-in-law’s garage. Folks try to reach out to him and encourage him to connect with people, but he stays isolated. He falls…

We both really enjoyed this Jonathon Demme story about a junkie on leave from rehab who’s attending her sister’s wedding. The beautiful Anne Hathaway (Kim) stars in this story of family love and dysfunction, the difficulties of coming to terms and accepting responsibility faced by those in rehab and those in ‘the real world’. Wonderful…

We both really enjoyed this French film about a chambermaid who becomes obsessed with chess. She turns to her American employer, Kevin Kline, for lessons and he obliges. It’s a very interesting film with looks at class, gender, and age through the prism of chess as she becomes completely taken over by the game. Her…

We both really enjoyed this crude, rude, not-for-the-kids smash hit musical from the creators of South Park. It lovingly skewers the theology of the Latter Day Saints while eventually reminding us that all religion is just about metaphor. Although lots of folks don’t seem to make that leap. Very funny, musically catchy, and outrageous look…

We both really enjoyed this based-on-a-true-story of a quadriplegic French aristocrat and the street-wise African immigrant helper he hires as a personal aid. Warm, touching, funny, and only a little of the “Magic Negro”. In the end, much more about class and attitude than about race and that’s what rescues the film. It’s well worth…

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 really appreciated this study of a couple coping. Fiona (Julie Christie) is slipping rapidly into an Alzheimer’s Disease dementia while Grant (Gordon Pinset) struggles to keep her both present and with him. Very Canadian film made with silences and thoughtfulness. She loses her near present but remembers the pains of the past as…

We both liked, appreciated, and were troubled by this black-and-white German meditation on paired public and private denial, cruelty, repression, and hypocrisy. Class, religion, status, and gender all play roles in this painful cultural study of a small village on the eve of WWI plagued by public and private atrocities. It sets up later disasters,…

We both liked this remake of the Graham Green classic about the entry of the US into the Vietnam conflict. Bronwen liked it more than I, however, as I adore the book and know it too well. It stars Michael Caine as Fowler, the English journalist, and Brendan Frasier as Pyle, the CIA man creating…

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 liked this incredibly sentimental, melodramatic weepie about a divorced architect, George (Kevin Kline), who loses his job and finds out he’s dying from cancer. The movie follows his efforts to reconcile with his rebellious and outrageously self-destructive 16-year old son Sam (Hayden Christensen) by having him live with him for the summer and…

We both liked this disturbing docudrama about the massacre in Londonderry in 1972. I was in England at the time, when 14 Irish civil rights marchers and stone throwers (some of each) were shot by British troops who overreacted and sparked the emergence of violence on an altogether new level. It revived the provisional IRA,…