Index 2010

Beauty and the Beast

The Boys in the Band

Brand Upon the Brain!

Breathless

Broken Embraces

The Brown Bunny

City Island

The Class

Le Corbeau

The Cry of the Owl

Detour

Le Deuxieme Souffle

Les Enfants Terribles

A Fistful of Dollars

Fists in the Pocket

Four Flies on Grey Velvet

400 Blows

The Ghost Writer

Hands Over the City

Heading South

Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer

Inglourious Basterds

I've Loved You So Long

Jules et Jim

Kinamand

King Rat

Let The Right One In

The Mad Detective

Memories of Murder

Notorious

The Panic in Needle Park

El Perdicion de los Hombres

Performance

Pineapple Express

Rosemary's Baby

Roxanne

The Secret in their Eyes

Stone Reader

The Strange One

Sunset Blvd.

Super Fly

Thief

Time Out

Two Men in Town

Unconscious

Up in the Air

The Virgin Suicides

Vodka Lemon

Walker

White Dog

Zombieland

Fists in the Pocket (Italian)

What a shocking surprise. Netflix calls this a horror movie. It isn't. It is a fascinating look at a dysfunctional Italian family, and how they consider themselves "uncurable." There's murder, class issues, hinted at incest, and other things. I gave it five stars on the Netflix rating system. I put more recent (movie was filmed in 1965) stuff from the director Bellochio on my queue.

The Secret in Their Eyes (Spanish)

Romantic and hard-boiled, "The Secret in Their Eyes" (Spanish) is an old-fashioned movie in the best sense. The actors are effective, the story has too many plot twists (I'm okay with that), and the direction feels like a big budget Hollywood movie. This won the Foreign Language Academy Award in 2010. Highly recommend.

Unconscious (Spanish)

Charming, clever and funny, "Unconscious" (Spanish) is a Freudian romantic comedy. It reminds me of Mike Leigh's "Topsy-Turvy" in it's period splendor, of Woody Allen and Pedro Almodovar comedies.

October

A moving tragicomedy, Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides", brings a light touch to a dark subject. I'll probably rent "Marie Antoinette" as a result of this and "Lost in Translation".

Recently released by Criterion, Jean Pierre Melville's "Le Deuxieme Souffle" (French) is well plotted, well paced and well acted. It's kind of long, but it doesn't feel that way. More like a novel you don't want to end.

I like Alain Delon. I like Jean Gabin. "Two Men in Town" (French) appears to be a caper movie. Part of it is, but it really is an indictment of the parole system and of capital punishment. The movie moves at it's own pace, and the end is moving.

The Boys in the Band

A little dated, kind of stagey, and the dialogue is too clever by half. But, the acting is superlative and watching "The Boys in the Band" is still a moving experience.

The Cry of the Owl (French)

When I first read Patricia Highsmith's "The Cry of the Owl" (French), it seemed like it could never be a movie. This version by the Claude Chabrol who passed away last week showed how wrong I could be.