Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

8.5/10
This is probably the most epic entrance in film history. Wayne certainly has a sort of untouchable magnetism about him in this movie, and he's always a joy to watch. In fact, everyone is - the casting is a major strength, not to mention Ford's incredible direction. Everything still looks sumptuous and thrilling, even in black and white. The climactic shootout between the stagecoach and the Apaches was intense, with a couple of really impressive stunts thrown in too. There wasn't much not to like about this one.

12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006)

7/10
I've been enjoying Romanian films and particularly Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective lately, so I went back to the director's first film. The original Romanian title is "A fost sau n-a fost?" which loosely translated means "Was there or wasn't there?", the question referring to central focus of the movie - if there really was a revolution in the small town of Vaslui, and if it took place before 12:08pm, the moment dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu fled. Like Police, Adjective, the film is dissection of minutae - of language, things we take for granted, assumptions, unquestioned beliefs etc. It's not quite as quietly devastating as Adjective (12:08 is more black comedy) but it's definitely cut from the same cloth, which is a good thing.
The film has an interesting structure, focusing on the lives of three characters who eventually come together for the last half of the film on a television program debate about whether there was a revolution or not. I was having a hard time getting interested in the characters at first but the debate (which takes up about the last 45 minutes of the film or so) was compelling enough as to almost make me want to go back and rewatch the first half. Sometimes I felt the film was "too Romanian" and some of it was flying over my head but it still hooked me in the end.

The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010)

7/10
It was better than I expected, with great performances all around (although Mark Ruffalo is a little out of his element at times). The story provides a lot of food for thought and our sympathies and condescension are often stretched in all different directions. There was nothing that blew my mind but it was a nice, satisying, intelligent family drama.

Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, 2009)

9/10
Well-to-do parents raise their son and two daughters (all young adults) in a gorgeous, fenced-in house outside the city, teaching them that zombies are little yellow flowers, toy planes in the backyard grass are the ones they see in the sky that have fallen to earth, and that they may only leave home when their dogtooth has fallen out (left or right, it doesn't matter). Director and co-writer Giorgos Lanthimos eviscerates the idea of the family unit and the way we're raised and does it so effortlessly, as if this were a documentary study of an actual family on some other planet. Overall I found this film genuinely harrowing, and the morbid black comedy undercurrent only underscores how disturbing the whole thing is. This is squarely in Haneke/Funny Games territory, so you can use that as a barometer if you like. A couple of overtly shocking scenes, while extremely effective as you watch the movie, have me thinking the day after that maybe Lanthimos is trying a bit too hard to be memorable. But my stomach was in knots hours after seeing it, so job well done then.
Special mention should be made for the actors who played the three kids (two of the three non-professionals), especially the girls, who are brilliant.

Head (Bob Rafelson, 1968)

6/10
1968 curio starring the Monkees, written and produced by Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson. There isn't a plot to speak of - the four are thrown into a bunch of mostly surrealist sketches that last for about 5-10 minutes apiece, and then they're awkwardly segued into another. Music numbers abound, as well as cameos (Sonny Liston and Frank Zappa to name but two) and Help!-esque self-aware digs at the bands' commercialism and phoniness. The lazy stabs at the establishment, Vietnam, drugs, etc prefigure Rafelson and Nicholson's work with Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, but this is generally a mess. There are a couple of moments of inspiration, particularly the psychedelic opening under water sequence and a wild concert scene towards the end.
Predictably the film was something of a career killer...other Monkees movie projects were cancelled and their record sales took a dive thereafter. Kind of fascinating in a "what were they thinking" kind of way now, though.