2010: The Social Network

The Film Everybody's Talking about, a courtroom drama of sorts, is an all-around good, funny and well-photographed dramedy, though it's a little too textbook to excite me. (7)

1920: The Neighbors

The best Keaton short I've seen so far, with lots of cool stunts. A bit like The General, only shorter and without trains. (7)

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)

1983: Zelig

Woody Allen's mockumentary on the "chameleon man" whose looks change in response to his surroundings pretty much takes the format of a standard History Channel documentary and is about as entertaining - but a little more so for the occasional typical Allen joke ("I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women."). (6.5)

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)

1966: Alfie

You can read this film about a womanizer with a small conscience as either a statement about the advantages of conventional monogamy or a celebration of alpha maleness with a tacked-on ending to set the church's mind at ease. Either way, a bad basic idea. (5)

1966: What's up, Tiger Lily?

I though it was a joke when it said on the back of the DVD case that they took a Japanese action movie and added a new soundtrack. Not so! Quite silly. I wouldn't want to see a hundred movies like that, but one was quite entertaining. (7)

1980: Stardust Memories

This almost plotless picture is Woody Allen's Otto e mezzo, a film about a famous director (Allen) who gets pestered by half of the people about how brilliant they are and the other half about how his old films were funnier. But it's better than Fellini's movie, or at least the 25 minutes I managed to sit through, merging Allen's usual humour with some shots of real beauty. And aliens. (7.5)

1962: El ángel exterminador

The bourgeois guests at a dinner party find themselves unable to leave afterwards. Their subsequent behaviour suggests poor stress resistance. Featuring lots of dialogue, perhaps too much, and the little surrealistic touches one may expect from Bunuel (in addition to the general surrealistic setup). Why not? (6)

2008: Synecdoche, New York

Brilliant movie, reviewed here. (8.5)

1975: Love and Death

Woody Allen's very silly film about a Russian torn between war and females' loins, which plays endlessly on his betaness and is really very silly indeed, is by far the funniest of his films I've seen. That is all. (7.5)

1939: Ninotchka

Beautiful but stern Russian special envoy "Ninotchka" Yakushova (Greta Garbo), while in Paris on an official mission, falls into the hands of a playboy, who, um, makes her a woman. If you can deal with this plot, it's a charming old black-and-white comedy for rainy afternoons. Garbo, by the way, laughs! (7)

1968: The Producers

In order to defraud investors, a Broadway producer and his accountant devise a scheme to produce a flop. They think they've found the right script when they come across Springtime for Hitler, but of course it turns out to be a huge success. - Much too slapsticky for my taste, but even so, the tightly scripted movie provides reasonably good entertainment. (6.5)

1960: Charlotte et son Jules

Upon the return of his ex-girlfriend into his flat, a young man starts a ten-minute monologue until the film comes to a predictable "surprise" ending. Pointless twelve-minute early Godard. (4)

1959: Charlotte et Véronique, ou Tous les garçons s'appellent Patrick (All the Boys Are Called Patrick)

Godard shot this short a in the year before he did À bout de souffle, but, working from a script by Eric Rohmer, he naturally couldn't produce anything resembling a masterpiece. The story features a couple of female flatmates who go out one day to be chatted up seperately by the same guy, tell about it each other in the evenings, and guess what happens at the end. Exactly the same story, with genders reversed, was made into the excrutiating rap song "Die da" by Die Fantastischen Vier about forty years later, the lyrics having the decisive advantage that it's unclear until the end that the two friends are talking about the same person. Well. (5)

2010: Sex and the City 2

I understand every bit of criticism in Roger Ebert's one-star review, but I can't say I hated the film. Yes, we made fun of it and it's certainly no Some Like It Hot, but at times I laughed with the movie and, never having seen an episode of Sex and the City, found it an interesting sociocultural experience overall. (unrated)

1930: Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris)

Clair's partially sound/partially silent romance wields lots of Old Paris charm (despite being obviously filmed in the studio), but it has extremely little plot for a ninety minute film and is accordingly slow. Not nearly as good as Le Million. (6)

1924: Paris qui dort (At 3:25)

René Clair's half-hour silent about a group of people who are the only ones awake and moving in a Paris that has otherwise come to a standstill is a mixture of the charming and the lengthy. (6)

1982: The King of Comedy

Set in contemporary New York, this Martin Scorsese-directed movie, stars Robert de Niro as a chronic loser who is driven to violence by his inability to adjust to the social world around him, but is ultimately not punished for it. - Yeah, it sounds like Taxi Driver, but the synopsis applies equally to The King of Comedy, which must be described as its companion piece, though in terms of aesthetics the latter film is not in the same league as the former. What's worse, while Taxi Driver makes the audience oscillate between a lack of comprehension of and pity with Travis Bickle, The King of Comedy invites scorn for the insufferable wannabe comedian Rupert Pupkin, thus forcing the audience to display one of their lesser characteristics: the tendency to look down on losers. (unrated)

1921: The Kid

Crisp, funny, touching and featuring a great score (composed in 1971) as well as that certain something it's hard to put one's finger on, The Kid, about The Tramp's adventures with his cute adoptive son, may well be the quintessential Chaplin film. (8)