Videodrome - 1983 - 4 Stars

Actors: James Woods, Sonja Smits

Director: David Cronenberg

There's not much separating Videodrome from a film ripe for Mystery Science Theater 3000. In fact, maybe there's nothing at all, except that Videodrome is fascinating and the movies shown on MST3K are terrible. Still, Videodrome has many of the hallmarks of the B-picture - homemade special effects, outlandish sci-fi, and a loose grip on the way people actually think and act. Regardless, David Cronenberg has total confidence in his vision of a paranoid cable TV executive who sees potential profit in an underground movie, and the consequences that follow therefrom. It's difficult not to respect an auteur's vision when he's clearly made exactly what he set out to do.

Elephant - 2003 - 4½ Stars, 2½ Stars

Actors: Alex Frost, Eric Deulen

Director: Gus Van Sant

I decided to give Elephant two ratings - its cinematography and direction is unbelievable. However, I do have to confess that I am a giant fan of Van Sant's aesthetic, even if I'm not sure he does all that much with it. A single tragic day at a high school is a perfect place for his Satantango-style examination of crossing paths and sad confluences.

The second rating is for shallowness in character - Elephant almost expects you to invest its characters with your own memories or perceptions of high school, because whatever work it does is largely image-based. This works in some instances, but falls terribly short in others.

Trainspotting - 1996 - 3 Stars

Actors: Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner

Director: Danny Boyle

Trainspotting gets filed under the list of 'Films I Should've Seen 10 Years Ago", a style-over-substance film that launched Danny Boyle and Ewan McGregor's careers. It's provocative and creates some unforgettable images, but does so at the expense of any character development or sense of plot. There's also the seemingly standard mid 90s post-Tarantino deconstruction of some pop culture item - is this still a thing in movies now? It might blend in seamlessly in newer movies, but here it feels self-conscious and largely uninteresting. There's also that late 90s English movie thing where someone speaks with such a deep accent that it's impossible to understand half of what they say - I'm glad I don't see any movies like that anymore.

Before Sunset - 2004 - 4½ Stars

Actors: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Director: Richard Linklater

Note: Very Minor Spoilers

It can be difficult to make a film about memory. We've seen lots of 'great' films about it - Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Inception - but it's not easy to capture the feeling of a person being in one place and time while thinking (and feeling) about another. The characters in Before Sunset are in two places - in the film's present, and nine years ago, during the events of Before Sunrise. Other than a brief montage of the earlier film, we don't see images from there - the film brilliantly manages to rely on our memory of the previous movie, and I think it succeeds no matter how much of the original film the viewer actually remembers.

The film also manages to turn on the fact that what we say, how we act, and what we're thinking can be three different things - the tension is created by the fact that one character may or may not betray what they're thinking either by how they act or what they say.

Moneyball - 2011 - 3 Stars

Actors: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill

Director: Bennett Miller

I've read Moneyball, and reading books before seeing the filmed adaptation of the book is usually a way to dislike the movie. I'm not aggrieved at what was cut out of the film - in fact, this is a rather excellent adaptation of the work. I think the writing was strong. I think the performances throughout were strong. I'm just not sure that a film could've gotten to the heart of Moneyball and its central character Oakland GM Billy Beane.

Beane is driven to win, and that's a difficult thing to portray on screen - yes, there are some thrown chairs, smashed stereos, and angry speeches made at a losing team. Yes, he's incapable of watching his own team play, because he gets too worked up about it. But the film has a hard time letting us into Beane's head - perhaps it never really wanted to go there, but it never ends up there. Well-made, worth seeing, but ultimately forgettable.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore - 1974 - 4 Stars

Actors: Ellen Burstyn, Kris Kristofferson

Director: Martin Scorsese

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore is a classic '70s' film - it's a slow-moving character study about a largely regular person. Do we even have movies about poor people anymore, or just movies about poor people who become rich? Alice struggles to find employment after her husband's death, as she goes on the road with her 12 year old son with the hope of eventually returning to her hometown to live.

Knowing what I knew about this movie going in (very little), I joked to myself that Scorsese would have all sorts of fast camera zooms and 'Sympathy For the Devil' on the soundtrack. Not quite - but the film is laid out with the vision of a master. A lot of these 70s talkfests stick the camera in one place, or they'll start a scene in an interesting place but not finish anywhere interesting. This film is clearly made by someone who thinks visually first and foremost.

Crank 2: High Voltage - 2009 - 3½ Stars

Actors: Jason Statham, Amy Smart

Directors: Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor

Is there anything sillier than the Crank movies? Probably not. Anything more awesome? Probably lots of things. Still, the lengths to which the Crank films go to entertain is quite something - no act is too foul or too violent, and no camera movement is too stylized.

Crank 2 revolves around a protagonist whose artificial heart has only an internal battery - the only way it can be charged is if Jason Statham exposes himself to electricity. This video-game style premise permeates the entire film. The only downside is that this video game gets slightly repetitive - even at 85 minutes, a film this constantly amped up gets tiresome, especially when we know our protagonist is in no real danger. I'm not sure I would watch a Crank 3.