1991: Homicide

Starts out as a cool cop flick, then devolves into a drama about Jewish identity. Shame. (6.5)

1998: Rushmore

Wes Anderson's movie about an outsider at an expensive high school is noteworthy for the contrast between the quirkiness it's trying very hard to project and the fact that the screenplay is a collection of the most-used devices from the screenwriting textbook. A self-indulgent film about a self-indulgent teenager, but it does have its strenghts, such as Bill Murray, Olivia Williams, early The Who songs, and a play about the Vietnam war. (6)

1999: The Limey

This variant of the man seeks revenge story suffers from a bad case of The "Blimey Mate" Problem, complete with Cockney Rhyming Slang; indeed it's a pretty unsophisticated script all around. Director Steven Soderbergh perhaps should have gotten an Oscar for making it into a visually interesting, reasonably entertaining film. (6.5)

1998: Enemy of the State

The plot is a man on the run, the target audience is the not-too-bright, and it has a political message, too: this film has a lot going against it. (5)

1997: Kiss the Girls

Filmed in the standard turn-of-the-century-American-suspense-film cinematography, this movie about a pervert kidnapper, a victim and a policeman reliably takes us from one plot point to another, but fails to make the audience care about the characters. (6)

1999: Il mio viaggio in Italia (My Voyage to Italy)

Martin Scorsese's very entertaining tour through the history of Italian cinema up until the 1960s, featuring all the films you might expect in such a documentary. Though I wish he'd bashed a famous director's film from time to time rather than criticizing by omission (Le notti di Cabiria gets about a third of a sentence), one couldn't imagine a more affa- and knowledgeable tour guide than Scorsese. And those eyebrows! Those eyebrows do me every time. (7.5)

1998: The General

Martin Cahill, the Irish gangster boss this John Boorman picture is about, is no Don Corleone, and The General is no Godfather. It is one of those colour-to-black-and-white jobs that usually go wrong, suffers from an awful soundtrack remindful of the early 1980s (saxophone!) and, like most biopics, lacks a decent narrative arc. Having said that, there's enough happening here to keep you decently entertained for two hours. (6)

1997: Insomnia

A cop goes to northern Norway, where the sun never sets, to investigate the murder of a young woman. Not the most untroubled man to begin with, he can't sleep. Slow descent towards madness, morally questionable behaviour. Special mention for the camera work: To call the colouring pale would be an understatement; rather, there seems to be an abundance of light on the screen. Good, off-kilter neo-noir. Or blanche. Well, you get the idea. (7)

1995: To Die For

With a few small changes in the script and a few major changes in style, the film featuring Nicole Kidman as a superficial bitch determined to make it on television could have been a neo-noir; as it is, it's more of a media/American dream satire that's visually unappealing in a 1980s way - and I don't just mean Nicole Kidman's makeup. (6)

1992: Bad Lieutenant

Building your film around a cop that does all kinds of drugs, cheats and is generally devoid of morals is a bit of a cheap idea, the kind of thing that appeals to sixteen-year-olds, and at times the film is way too slow. On the upside: A perfectly cast leading man and the whole thing filmed with just the right amount of nittygrittyness. Summary: Tries to be Taxi Driver, isn't. (6)

1997: Hana-bi (a.k.a. Fireworks)

Nishi, a policeman, has a dying wife, one partner dead and one in the wheelchair. He also has debts with the Yakuza and a taste for violence. But the plot isn't really important in this sparse Japanese film which puts most violence off-screen and works mostly through the interplay between Joe Hisaishi's brilliant score - the theme repeated in different versions, really -, the monochrome pictures and main actor Beat Takeshi's stoic one-note performance. In the last third the slow pacing is taken a little too far for my taste. (7)

Film Links #2

1. Neven Sesardic: "Gattaca", from The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Cinema (pdf)

2. The best and worst movie posters of 2009? (Pointer)

3. Avatar: Pocahontas in space? You can see the same idea elsewhere on the web, but this execution seems to make the point quite succinctly.

1996: Hard Eight (a.k.a. Sydney)

Something is missing in this deliberately slow-paced gangsters and lowlives flick which keeps me from endorsing it wholeheartedly. But never mind, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson went on to great things. (6.5)