Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Stephen Daldry, 2011)

0/10
I tried to watch this one with an open mind, but it felt like the movie was fighting me the entire way. Starting with the protagonist Oscar, who may be the most irritating character since Jar Jar Binks and I say that with no hyperbole whatsoever. Oscar lost his dad in the 9/11 attacks and according to the movie, this is all we need to feel unending sympathy for him - despite the fact that he's obnoxious, rude, and downright unlikeable in almost every scene he's in. Losing a parent is tragic, but when it's used as lazy screenwriting shorthand, its impact is greatly diminished. One starts to wonder why Oscar deserved such a great dad in the first place.
But that's par for the course in a movie where no one acts like a human being, save maybe for Oscar's charming/dorky dad, played by Tom Hanks. The rest are a compilation of screen writing clichés, either with quirks that are supposed to be somehow endearing, or devoid of logic altogether (the explanation for why Oscar's mom lets her 12 year old son traipse around New York either by himself or in the company of a mute recluse is truly mindboggling and hilarious).
The movie's use of the 9/11 attacks to wrench an emotional response out of viewers is manipulative, but generally inoffensive for most of the running time...until at the very end, after Oscar finally comes to terms with the fact that his father is gone and won't be coming back and this is something that he'll have to live with (reflecting indeed the lives of many children who lost their parents in the attacks, a rare moment of realistic human feeling in the film). Immediately after coming to this conclusion he finds a note his father had hidden all along for him, congratulating and confirming his pride in and love for his son, providing him with a measure of closure that virtually no child who actually is in Oscar's situation ever benefitted from. It's cheap, cloying, and downright offensive, and makes an already bad movie that much more worthy of contempt.

Best Worst Movie (Michael Stephenson, 2009)

7.5/10
It seems like what most legendary bad movies have in common is the bloodymindedness of someone making the thing, convinced that what they're doing is genuine art. Plan 9 has Ed Wood, Battlefield Earth has John Travolta, The Room has Tommy Wiseau, and the subject of this documentary, Troll 2, has Claudio Fragasso. Though he's not the focus of the film (that would be George Hardy, who played the father), he's easily the most fascinating - utterly convinced that the recent surge in "so bad it's good" attention paid to Troll 2 is actually American audiences finally coming around to understand his "ahead of its time" masterpiece. In fact, Troll 2 has a lot of fascinating figures attached to it that make it special, and indeed worthy of a documentary - its acting and production crew a strange mix of people from those who really believe in the artistry of the work, to ones that can accept it as a terrible movie and laugh along with audiences, to others that seem slightly embarassed but are willing to go along for the ride. George Hardy seems to encompass almost all these reactions simultaneously, and makes for a good focal point. As a documentary it's mostly celebratory stuff for pre-existing fans of Troll 2, but with some nice interesting dashes of the strange personalities that went into making the thing.

A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011)

6.5/10
Considering how tepid I usually find his films, I've seen an unusually large amount of David Cronenberg's works. ADM is probably the most restrained I've seen from him, but falls squarely into the same "it's not bad, I guess" realm as the rest of his movies do for me. The best thing about this is the acting - Fassbender is endlessly watchable, again dragging a film up to higher levels than it's worth (see also Shame). Knightley's performance is over the top, and a little awkward in those more hysterical moments, but she settles into her role quite nicely. Mortensen never really seemed to get a full grip on Freud, but he has less to work with than the other two.
It's hard to really see what the movie is going for most of the time. It dances around Freud and Jung's psychoanalytical theories, Freud and Jung's friendship and falling out, Jung and his patient/mistress relationship with Sabina, Sabina's evolution from mental patient to psychiatrist to mother and wife...but it can't coalesce these themes into anything coherent and the movie suffers from a serious lack of focus, made worse by some horribly choppy and almost comical editing. But the subject matter is always interesting and the performers make it so it's never a chore to watch either. Just doesn't reach the pedigree you might have expected given who's involved.

Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes, 2011)

7/10
Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut if I'm not mistaken, an adaptation of a lesser-known Shakespeare play. It isn't hard to see why this is one of his lesser-known works indeed - it's pretty simple fare. And it's not hard to see why Fiennes' cast himself in the lead, as he gets to sink his teeth into an insanely over-the-top performance, which he does rather masterfully. If it's a good-but-not-great adaptation of a good-but-not-great play, it still does plenty of justice to its source and makes no real missteps along the way.

Into the Abyss (Werner Herzog, 2011)

8/10
A very respectable, easily watchable Werner Herzog documentary as straightforward as anything he's ever done. At times it feels like a kind of by-the-numbers A&E special, but that's the cynic in me. There are enough Herzogian touches to make it feel original enough, particularly the very last line of the movie. It's a very interesting, heartfelt study into humanity above all else, and it ends up being quite moving, if not devastatingly original.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Brad Bird, 2011)

7.5/10
As far as action movies go, this one was pretty much everything you could ask for. Tom Cruise did all kinds of crazy stuff, and put in a very good performance too (better than the movie demands, at least). I thought the second half was a bit more boring than the first, and one action sequence was badly botched (Cruise and his nemesis chasing each other in a sandstorm, the constant brownish blur of CGI surrounding them serving only to mask the fact that they weren't really in Dubai and little else). But I was entertained, so I was happy.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

9/10
The most feminist movie I've ever seen is also notoriously one of the most difficult to endure. A 3 1/2 hour movie in which very little happens except the day-to-day monotonies of its title character. This was a movie I was born to like, and after reading about it for so long, it was nice to sit down and watch it and have it be exactly what I knew it would be. I don't feel like I watched a movie so much as I lived with Jeanne for 3 1/2 hours.

Le Revelateur (Philippe Garrel, 1968)

9/10
A 1968 film coming in at just over an hour featuring three actors (a mother, a father, a son), no dialogue or any soundtrack whatsoever, high-contrast black-and-white photography, and was apparently filmed with a majority of the cast and crew under the influence of LSD. Luckily I have a high tolerance for drug-induced 60's pretentiousness, so I found it quite fascinating in its own way. Can't way to see some of director Philippe Garrel's other wackiness from the same era, particularly La Cicatrice Intérieure starring Garrel's muse and partner, Nico.

Carnage (Roman Polanski, 2011)

9/10
Adapted (and probably virtually unchanged) from a play, Carnage features two sets of parents in one room of one house for its entire running time, discussing the fall-out from one parents' son hitting the others' in the face with a stick. In very Bunuelian fashion, things eventually descend into chaos and hysteria. If the trajectory is predictable, it's a heck of a lot of fun getting there. John C. Reilly, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet are all fantastic, perfectly cast, and clearly revelling in what is patently an actor's movie. I'm giving it extra marks for being that most rare thing - an English-language comedy that appeals to adults without being juvenile (mostly). I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard in the theatre.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (David Fincher, 2011)

8.5/10
David Fincher's adaptation trounces the earlier Swedish adaptation, which now seems completely elementary in comparison, but still can't best its source material. As in the Swedish film, a lot of the cuts are smart and logical. Craig and Mara are great; Mara steals the show as Fincher had pretty much set her up to do. The script is smart and never drags, despite the 2h45m runtime. In the end, though (and maybe this is also due to the source material), it feels like it's missing a big catharsis, like it should culminate to something massive and never does. This movie cements my belief even more now that the ending of Larsson's novel is helplessly clunky (though Fincher's version mercifully does away with all that Australia stuff) and unfortunately it drags down what is otherwise an excellent, exciting and sexy thriller.

Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010)

7.5/10
The central conceit of Abbas Kiarostami's latest film is a clever one - a man and a woman meet for the first time, go strolling around Italy for the day, and are mistaken for a married couple. Slowly they begin to act like one, with such conviction that it prompts a lot of interesting questions - are the two using their newfound 'roles' to exorcise demons of past relationships? Or to say what they could never say to their current partners, if they exist? Or is this simply Kiarostami putting a budding relationship in a compressor - sort of a pessimistic Before Sunrise, crushing 20 years of togetherness into one afternoon? It's impossible to say. The script is endlessly intriguing but as a film, it's not a rousing success, which is down to the two leads. Juliette Binoche is a fantastic actress while William Shimell is a first-timer and at times it shows, rather painfully. I have no idea why Kiarostami chose to put such wildly disparate performers opposite each other. Also, their characters are not particularly empathetic - Binoche's is endearing, but borders on nutty at times. This is amplified by Shimell's character - he never fully commits to their 'pretend' marriage, wearing a perpetual look of bemusement that subtlely implies that he too, at the end of it all, might just think this woman is crazy. The movie basically makes you spend a day with two characters you don't particularly enjoy spending a day with. Frustrating because it could have been a really great movie, were it not for these missteps.

A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)

7/10
A very interesting family drama from Iran that raises a multitude of ethical questions, the strength of this movie is the way it shifts guilt, implicitness, and good/bad intentions from one character to the other seamlessly. The movie felt almost like a prism - with different light let in depending on which angle it was being viewed at. Unfortunately I was never as wrapped up in the drama as much as I wanted to be, and it didn't really register with me emotionally. Good, and hardly flawed, but not something I connected to either.

Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961)

9.5/10
I watched the first 30 minutes or so so many times before writing this review I think I lost count. An impenetrable Rubik's cube of dreamlogic (or maybe just pseudo-philosophical arty nonsense), I was completely under its spell - from the beautiful dialogue to the unbelievable hotel itself, and everything in between, particularly Alain Resnais' other-worldly mise-en-scenes. I will say that I enjoyed exploring the hotel, the guests, the conversations, the games, the courtyard, etc more than the actual meat of the movie (a man trying to convince a woman that they had met exactly one year ago), so I'll ding it half a point there, but this is a movie I'll be watching over and over again until I die.

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)

8/10
An exceptionally slow-moving anti-Western in the truest sense of the word (women and Native Americans winning out over the white man?), there isn't a whole lot to the movie but it very quietly spins an interesting yarn concerning questions of trust, faith, feminism and humanity. Just don't go in expecting a whole lot of action.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)

8.5/10
This is actually a surprisingly wonderful animal, and a true rarity seemingly outside of Pixar movies - it's witty, charming, both heart-warming and sad, and it can be enjoyed and appreciated on multiple levels, young or old. And it has some of the cleanest and best-looking 3D animation I've ever seen, a big plus. In the end the many themes, of loneliness and trying to find one's place in the world and friendship and the magic of cinema and understanding across generational divides...it might sound cliché when I write it but they're all handled so deftly and with genuine emotion by Scorsese, it's impossible to not be moved.
My only real complaints was that the movie takes a while to really get going, and I wished there was more laugh-out-loud humor - there's some cuteness and some stuff that'll make you smile, but not much genuinely funny as in a Pixar movie. That would have really put Hugo over the top, for me.