The Wolf Of Wall Street - 2013 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill
Director:  Martin Scorsese

'Memoir films' are a genre that Martin Scorsese has tackled before, most notably in Goodfellas, the film to which The Wolf Of Wall Street is endlessly compared.  Both films feature protagonist con men telling their life story (which story is purportedly true), but considering they are con men, it's very easy to believe that there are many fictions intervowen into this narrative.  When a self-promoter tells any story, it's with the aim of promoting himself - this is his life story, so imagine how much self-promotion there is in here!  The film plays around with this idea of the narrator's memory versus actual events a few times.

The Wolf Of Wall Street manages to fully examine what happens when you view everything around you as vehicles to satisfy your desires.  I'm not sure where the ninnies got the idea that this film glorifies wealth and drug use.

Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries And Mentors Of Ricky Jay - 2012 - 3 Stars

Subject:  Sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay and his development as an artist
Director:  Molly Bernstein

I hate the term 'magic' - indeed, this documentary prefers the term sleight-of-hand - but Ricky Jay is a magician.  The thing about magic, memorably spoofed on Arrested Development, is that 'effects' (as they're called here) are secrets.  They're all the magician has - once he's told you the trick, it's useless.  So naturally this is a documentary about the fact that Ricky Jay has been told many secrets by many different prestidigitators, but none of those secrets are shared here.  It appears therefore that the defining characteristic of these people is delight in knowing things that others don't know, and it takes years of getting to know these people and earning their respect before they'll share anything with you.  That's a bit of a thin premise to hang a documentary on, and without archival film of Ricky Jay's act, there wouldn't be much to this at all.  But there's archival film of Ricky Jay's act.

Kontroll - 2005 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Sandor Csanyi, Zoltan Musci
Director:  Nimrod Antal

One can go through an easy list of Kontroll's influences - it's the director's first movie and it feels like it.  'I've always wanted to do this - let's do it!' seems like the attitude on some of the odd digressions the movie takes.  What's strange about this film is that even though it has a shambling quality to it - it doesn't really seem to conform to 3-act conventions - the characters are almost all stock Hollywood action-comedy film characters.  Nor does the plot quite move in the way that some action films do, where the entire film gobbles itself up, leaving no space for the viewer to imagine anything about its characters.

The movie begins with a warning from a Hungarian functionary who evidently approved the shooting locations - he claims that the characters depicted don't represent real people. This is a good reminder of how ballsy it has to be to be a filmmaker in a country like Hungary.

Smashed - 2012 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul
Director:  James Ponsoldt

One of the temptations of film is to jump through time.  We might be shown a relationship, then later on in the film, we might see its beginning.  It's tempting because stories are fun and it's a little thrill for the audience to see what the characters don't know, that this is going somewhere they can't imagine.  But life is always going somewhere people can't imagine.  One of the strengths of Smashed is that it lets us imagine what happened off-screen, because a lot of what goes on happens off-screen.

There's a few stock 'movie' things in here - conflicts resolve in ways that are telegraphed ahead of time.  And the film is so small-scale that sometimes it doesn't feel lived in - there's so few actors used that it feels like we're not getting the full picture of who these people are.  Still, it has strong performances and solid writing, and certainly does not outstay its welcome.

Drug War - 2012 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Honglei Sun, Louis Koo
Director:  Johnnie To

Drug War almost seems propagandistic in its opening moments, as hordes of police and surveillance converge on outmatched drug traffickers.  Considering the penalty for drug trafficking in China is death (and this is explicitly mentioned in the first ten minutes of the film), it seems like it might be a good idea to make a film where drug trafficking is shown as an impossible endeavor.  This tone shifts somewhere in the film, and that's what elevates this from a basic action/thriller type film into something quite a lot better.  It's still a genre film, but a high point of said genre.  I wish sometimes that American films could come unmoored in the way that this one does.