Fish Tank (Andrea Arnold, 2009)

8/10
This was on my to-watch list since it came out 4 years ago. Being sick and finding nothing else on Netflix that inspired anything in me, I finally watched it. It was pretty much what I expected it to be, with minimal twisting and turnings. Just a really well told, mostly sad story with a few brief glimmers of hope or happiness. Katie Jarvis and Michael Fassbender are both great, and the relationship that forms between them is interesting and handled well by writer/director Andrea Arnold. It's a tricky relationship with many nuances and it's to Arnold's credit that Fassbender's character especially doesn't come off as one-dimensional. The atmosphere she creates of a poor, working-class (let's go ahead and say white trash) England feels extremely real, too, without being cartoonish.

The Hunt (Thomas Vinterberg, 2012)

8.5/10
Over a year after it won Mads Mikkelsen a Best Actor prize at Cannes, I can finally see The Hunt for myself, legally, in theatres. And the studios can't figure out why people download movies? Give me a break. The day this sorry film distribution system breaks down the better we'll all be.
ANYWAY. Was it worth the wait? Definitely. Mads Mikkelsen plays a kindergarten aide wrongly accused by one of the children of inappropriate conduct. It was co-written and directed deftly and with a lot of maturity by ex-Dogme 95 adherent Thomas Vinterberg. It's a story that easily could have been played for over-the-top emotions, but both Vinterberg and Mikkelsen do a fantastic job keeping things in check. The bottled-up rage and injustice is felt in turn by the audience, who are rarely allowed any catharsis or any release from the predicament, just like the protagonist. It's a situation that plays out without any easy solutions offered, which is how it should be (unfortunately for all).
My only minor complaints is that the story plays out pretty much as you'd expect without much coming unseen, and that it felt to me like some of the reactions from the other adults in the film to the child's accusations were exaggerated for the benefit of the plot. However, maybe those reactions would indeed be a true reflection of real life reactions, so I can't criticize it too much. Overall highly recommended, and hats off to Vinterberg and Mikkelsen for elevating the material way above what might have been expected.

Berberian Sound Studio (Peter Strickland, 2012)

6/10
Peter Stickland has a way of making moves that sound like they'd be right up my alley, only to lead to inevitable disappointment. First there was his rape-revenge Romanian road movie Katalin Varga, and now his psychological thriller set in the early 80's giallo sound studio of the film's title.
It does some things really well, nailing the colors and atmosphere evocative of the time, and the soundtrack by the band Broadcast is really good too. But nothing much happens in the movie to make you care until it's too late - and by that point it feels like a parlour trick than a plot point or something of relevance. It feels like the movie ends just as it's really beginning, or that Stickland had half of an idea and couldn't figure out where else to go with it so just dropped it. I'm disappointed I wasn't able to like the movie any more than I did, and it's never a good sign when the fictional film being made in the movie (never shown) sounds more interesting than what's transpiring on-screen. It compelled me to put in a Mario Bava flick from the 70's that I was enjoying right up until I fell asleep, but I blame Stickland for getting me to that point, not Bava.