Certified Copy - 2010 - 4 Stars

Actors: Juliette Binoche, William Shimell

Director: Abbas Kiarostami

Certified Copy is a look at the genuine - a difficult thing to do through the lens of film, which is already artificial, and arguably more artificial than say, a novel. What's more genuine - our memories of the past, which are ostensibly fixed, or our experience of the present, which features changes of all sorts, changes which we may be only truly aware of when we examine the past?

In short, I can't spoil this film's plot at all, but it's heady stuff. There are recent films which have a similar theme, but compared to this they're inorganic, ungenuine, and artificial.

Limitless - 2011 - 3 Stars

Actors: Bradley Cooper, Robert DeNiro

Director: Neil Burger

How many high-concept films become total letdowns in the final 20 minutes? I don't know, but add Limitless to that list. Limitless feels like a film that had a different ending until some studio or focus group or something nixed the original. Still, it's (somewhat) visually inventive, has a solid hook, and decent performances - it's worth seeing if you want a movie that, ironically enough, turns most of your brain off.

The Puffy Chair - 2005 - 3 Stars

Actors: Mark Duplass, Katheryn Asleton

Director: Jay Duplass

The Puffy Chair seems to be a throwback to 70s films like The Last Detail or The King of Marvin Gardens - characters loosely drawn by what they do, adrift in a post-something state. There's emotional discussions, discussions where characters reveal more by what they don't say, and the like. There's also a fair amount of humor, but not humor in the arch Wes Anderson style that one might expect. Hardly essential viewing, but The Puffy Chair has a nice handmade aesthetic and avoids becoming a shaggy-dog story.

Masculin Feminin - 1966 - 4 Stars

Actors: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Ah, now that's much better. My last foray into Godard was his terrifically annoying Week End, which seemed to be a giant middle finger to everything. Masculin Feminin is like a quick middle finger - blink and you might miss it. It's prankish rather than openly hostile.

Masculin Feminin is made up of 15 vignettes that largely revolve around a left-wing journalist and his interactions with his girlfriend and her friends. It's chock-full of 60s talk - Socialism, birth control, music, advertising, the 'bourgeois' - but Godard doesn't let this sort of thing overwhelm the picture. The central vignettes are (to me) three conversations between a man and a woman. Godard lets the camera stay on one participant in these conversations for a long time - it's a very intimate thing to get to look at a close-up of someone's face when they're listening instead of when they're talking. He makes it clear that generally each person in these conversations is looking at the other, heightening the sense of intimacy, even though the two are not romantically involved.

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.