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)

1961: L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)

Alain Resnais' follow-up to the magnificent Hiroshima mon amour is set in a castle now functioning as a hotel: a man is telling a woman about what they did when they met last year, while she keeps telling him she doesn't remember. Situated on the line between conventional narrative cinema and the pure surrealism of films like L'age d'or and possibly the best-photographed b/w film I've ever seen, the picture seems to be aimed not so much at being understood intellectually as at putting the audience in a trance-like state. Alternatively, you might dismiss it as pretentious artsy-fartsy crap (AFM 5!).

Is it going too far to say that in his less accessible films David Lynch did nothing but take Marienbad, add violence and put American pop culture references where Resnais' film uses European high culture? Yes, probably. (8.5)

(How to win the game in the film explained in German and French)

2006: Lucky Number Slevin

It's one of those that some call "mindfuck movies" - films that make you aware that you don't know what's going on - and even beginning to summarize the plot would mean to spoil. Let's just say it's a comedy about killing people with lots of twists in the general Tarantino/Ritchie mode. The otherwise very enjoable screenplay suffers from wannabe cool (fax Tarantino?) dialogues and though there is nothing wrong with the direction I kept wondering what someone like Welles or Lynch would have done with the same material. Even so, a fun film for boys. (7)

As a sidenote, in purely business terms it seems like a particularly daft idea to call your film Lucky Number Slevin. A nontrivial portion of potential customers will type "Seven" instead of "Slevin" when looking for your product in databases. And some are going to write "No." or "#". Not good.