Pic of the Week

In many love stories, especially romantic comedies but even dramas like this one, there is a will-they-or-won’t-they tension that lasts the duration of the film. Often the question is contrived and forced as the screenwriter pushes boy and girl together, then pulls them apart, then pushes back together again, and so on.

Your average, run-of-the-mill sci-fi fan could easily feel ripped off by Solaris because there are no laser blasts or spaceship dogfights. It isn’t Star Wars, and it isn’t Star Trek. Where those movies are adventures, Solaris is a romance, a mystery, a drama, and an ethics debate.

Being a gentleman is exhausting, particularly when you do it for someone as young, demanding, and naively ungracious as Alice.

Assumptions can really color a movie. Going in, I knew The Piano Teacher had been called everything from brilliant to disgusting, and I feared the latter. But why the discrepancy? did the “brilliant” people like disgusting things or did the “disgusting” people miss some hidden brilliance?

Shot in Europe on high definition video over the course of several years, Our Daily Bread (AKA Unser Täglich Brot) is a visually poetic documentary about the production of food.

The last several action movies this summer have been big disappointments. U-571, Gladiator, even Shanghai Noon have all had sub-par action sequences with bad editing and sloppy timing.

I was beginning to think that I was becoming too demanding. But Mission: Impossible 2 convinced me that I was right to be disappointed by the other films, and it renewed my faith in the Hollywood action movie.

Actually, MI2 is as much a spy thriller as it is an action movie. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is called in to investigate the disappearance of a scientist and his mysterious concoctions called Chimera and Bellerophon. Fellow M:I agent Ambrose (Dougray Scott) has gone rogue and apparently kidnapped the scientist.

Sherlock Holmes is like Shakespeare, he’s always open to a fresh interpretation. In this case, Sherlock’s a brawling eccentric and this more adventurous incarnation stars in one of the year’s most genuinely fun movies.

As Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale began, I was reminded of the mockumentary For Your Consideration, in which Christopher Guest and his troupe picked on independent dramatic films. Their target was (yet another) film about a family reuniting at the holidays and working though their differences. I was immediately put on guard against schmaltz and sentimentality.

Made three years after Angèle, Harvest (AKA Regain) is one of Marcel Pagnol’s best films (at least of those available in the U.S.). It has the neat effect of being both humble and larger than life. It taps into primeval, Jungian emotions about the nobility of bread, soil, labor and community. When the Russians tried this, it felt like propaganda, but from Pagnol it feels like poetry.

Art is timeless. Art is a two-way communion between the artist and the viewer. Art is open to discussion and mystery. Art is somehow greater than the work itself. Few movies deserve to be called art. Werckmeister Harmonies is art.

Two sets of friends — Woodrow and Aiden, Milly and Courtney — meet at a cheap bar. Woodrow (writer/director Evan Glodell) and Milly (Jessie Wiseman) flirt over a cricket-eating contest. Woodrow is strong but shy. Milly is headstrong and not shy at all. She maneuvers him into asking for a date — not unwillingly. He proposes someplace nice, and she insists on the opposite. The worst place he knows is a dive he passed in Texas, and she says “let’s go.” So on their first date, they leave California for terrible Southern food.

Having avidly followed writer-director Krzysztof Kieslowski and director Tom Tykwer during the 1990s, I found Heaven to be a rare treat. Heaven looks great on DVD, but the extra features don’t answer the right questions.