2000: Fail-Safe

The black-and-white remake of the 1960s classic (which I've never seen) about an impeding nuclear war between the US and the USSR is sort of outdated, but manages to entertain throughout with a tight screenplay and good visuals. (7)

2006: Un printemps à Paris

A gangster film with the standard ingredients heist, hustlers, homicide. Plus a sick "love story", just because we're French. Not a bad screenplay, and a master would have made this a really good movie, but Jacques Bral isn't one of them, so instead you get what feels like a made-for-TV movie. (6)

2005: Red Eye

Highly conventional thriller about a young woman who's forced to assist a stranger in killing a celebrity, or else. Nothing wrong with it, nothing impressive about it. (6)

2005: A Cock and Bull Story

Winterbottom's postmodern mashup of a film version of Tristram Shandy and the behind-the-scenes story of the actors involved in this film is excellently structured and a lot of fun. (7.5)

2004: Enduring Love

You can't expect any movie to be as gripping as Ian McEwan's masterful novel Enduring Love, about a well-off man who gets stalked by a not-so-well-off one. The screenplay does, in fact, do a decent job - with the notable exception of its attempts to bring the evolutionary psychology of love onto the screen, a feature of the film which pulls off the trick of being trivial and wrong at the same time. But the quality of the movie that really sucks is its piss-poor "modern" visual style. The whole thing looks like a fucking Ikea catalogue! (5)

2009: Me and Orson Welles

The theatre's an attractive backdrop for movies anyway, and the setup here is nice, too: Young wannabe actor lucks into a job with pre-Citizen Kane, but already famous, Orson Welles, who is directing Julius Caesar and falls for a fellow employee, whom everyone else, including the boss, also finds attractive. It could be a great film, but was apparently streamlined according to screenwriting 101, which is rarely a good thing. I'm looking at you in particular, canned stupid foreseeable ending. (6.5)

2009: Antichrist

Lars von Trier is a director that has nothing on his mind but to deliver extreme emotional experiences to his audiences. That's fine with me, though in this shocker - about a couple retreating to the woods after their son's death - at times he's trying a little too hard. Even so, the somewhat Lynchesque film, which features the usual imagery like imposing trees, insects, talking foxes and a woman cutting her clit off - is a coherent and attractive audiovisual system. (7)

2008: Flammen & Citronen (Flame and Citron: The Nazi Assassins)

The film about resistance fighters in Nazi occupied Denmark is generally good, but little not-so-good elements here and there make it merely o.k. (6)

2001: Vanilla Sky

David Aames has it all: Good looks, great job, shitloads of money, and he gets to dump Cameron Diaz for Penelope Cruz. Naturally, fortune must soon deal him a bad hand, and deal him a bad hand it does. - Everybody seems to like the Spanish origninal (Abre los ojos) better. I haven't seen that one; at any rate, Vanilla Sky creates a cohesive aesthetic system which is pleasant in a Dido kind of way. Suits me fine. (7)

2008: Synecdoche, New York

Brilliant movie, reviewed here. (8.5)

2004: Collateral

A run-of-the-mill script about a cabbie who gets kidnapped by a contract killer to drive him around L.A. so he can go about his job. Directed by Michael Mann, but it's not in the same league as Heat. It's not even in the same league as Manhunter. (5.5)

2006: Lady in the Water

The film about a mysterious elf from the wet realms who needs help from an unlikely assortment of landlings, in which M. Night Shyamalan does his usual spiel, suffers a little from slowness, but more from the fact that the screenplay fails to make us care about said lady. Exposition, baby! (5.5)

2002: Femme Fatale

A heist and its aftermath have repurcussions when their protagonists meet again in Paris 7 years later and everybody's looking for revenge. This no-punches-pulled, wham-bam-bam, in-yo-face film is another quality piece of work from the underrated Brian de Palma, mainstream auteur. (7.5)

2007: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Although it's been a while since Pulp Fiction hit the screens (let alone the first printing of Tristram Shandy), nonlinear storytelling is still considered all the rage in contemporary Hollywood. There's nothing wrong with it per se, but when it is employed mainly as a gimmick, as in this thriller-drama about a robbery that goes all pear-shaped, the nonlinear fashion is a little annoying. Also, one wonders why an accomplished director like Sidney Lumet - with Dog Day Afternoon, perhaps the classic in the robbery-gone-pear-shaped genre, to his name - tries so hard to make this film look modern, making it look run-of-the-mill in the process, is a bit baffling. None of which is to say that this movie is as badly done as the previous sentence. (6)

2009: Surrogates

The Bruce Willis flick about a future in which people mind-control human-looking robots that they send out into the streets so they (the humans) can safely stay at home is professionally done all around, but no Blade Runner (6.5).

2009: Angels & Demons

With its high production values and general wham-bam-bam-ness, the film version of Dan Brown's thriller, about the hunt for kidnapped bishops in Rome, could be more fun if the viewer had to expand less energy on suspending disbelief. (6.5)

2009: Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)

Like the Stig Larsson runaway bestseller it is based on, the film takes its time, clocking in at about 150 minutes, though this is by no means to its detriment. Good work all around. (7)

2007: I'm Not There

Six actors playing six facets of Bob Dylan, with episodes from a variety of decades intercut with each other; in other words: this film makes a point of being nonlinear. In my view, it's taking that concept a bit far; despite knowing a bit about Dylan's life, I found it too fractured, but fully understand others disagreeing on that. Visually fine, good music (naturally), an abysmally bad performance by Ben Wishaw as one version of Dylan. (6.5)

2007: In the Valley of Elah

Despite asking us to sympathize with an ex-soldier who managed to raise his two sons into joining the army, the first three quarters of this film, about a father trying to find out who killed his son, work decently as a mystery, until the film starts to clumsily hurl its anti-war meassage at the audience. Possibly the most hideous last scene in movie history. (5)

2002: City by the Sea

Drug addict gets into trouble with the law, re: homicide. His father is a homicide detective. Conflict. - Set in a derelict Long Beach (more derelict than real Long Beach, according to Wikipedia), the film hardly uses the setting and generally suffers from its made-for-TV aesthetics. Someone like Cassavetes or Aronofsky might have made much more of this, one feels, have made much more of this. Still, not a bad film at all. (6.5)