Cake (Daniel Barnz, 2014)

6.5/10
I wasn't expecting too much from this, and about half an hour in I was sure I was going to hate it. Jennifer Aniston stars as Claire, a pain-riddled, grief-stricken, drug-addicted woman who initially appears to have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Another woman in her chronic pain sufferers support group, Nina, commits suicide, and Claire is fascinated by the incident to the point of being visited by Nina in hallucinations. Claire eventually tracks down Nina's windower, and the fact that he's blindingly handsome and charming and accepts crazy Claire and all her problems without a hitch...well the movie starts to shape up as another one of those dreadful things where all of a woman's problems are magically solved once she finally meets A Good Man.
Mercifully (and unexpectedly) the movie doesn't really take that path. That's not to say it's totally cliche-free, because it has its share of them, and much of the staging for the incidents that occur feel more like hacky screenwriter gimmicks and less like things that would actually occur to real people. But in the last act or so the movie does finally turn out to be an emotionally honest and rather sad portrayal of grief. I've never cared for Jennifer Aniston in anything but she does a very good job in a role that easily could have been histrionic and over-acted. No classic, but ultimately better than I thought it would be.

The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014)

8/10
As far as horror movies go I found this did a really job of embracing certain conventions while subverting others (the mother/son relationship, to say no more for fear of spoilers). Like It Follows, it mostly disposes of cheap jump scares and ends up creeping its way under your skin, although I can understand some feeling let down that there's no major "payoff scare". The story is compelling and a pleasingly new twist on an age old monster movie story and the acting is exceptional, in particular Essie Davis as the mother. I liked the throwback-ness of the Babadook itself, it has a kind of charming lo-fi aesthetic that brought me back to the days when horror movies weren't all CGI and makeup. Overall it was smart, well-crafted, respectful of genre conventions but innovative as well, and delivered on the scares. Very little not to like.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014)

6.5/10
More or less exactly what you'd expect to be, despite its odd existence ("black and white Iranian-language Spaghetti Western vampire movie ala Jim Jarmusch"). The B&W photography is very nice and the movie is well directed, and it has a great soundtrack. It moves at a glacial pace, but it feels a bit like it's leaning heavily on the "slow = artistic" trend and not because it serves the film any particular purpose. In fact the more I watched the harder I found it to shake this niggling feeling that if it weren't for all its pre-packaged exotica and bells and whistles ("A slow-paced vampire movie? Shot in black and white? In Persian?!?"), A Girl Walks Home wouldn't be talked about nearly as much as it is. Once you strip away those call-them-gimmicks-if-you-will, there's a concerning lack of story and depth to the movie. It's pretty and kind of cool but not something I see myself returning to, although I'll remain curious to see what else writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour comes up with next. I'd give the soundtrack a few more listens if I could find it, though.