Catfish (Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, 2010)

8/10
This was a pleasant surprise because I'd never heard anything about it, but it seems a lot of people were mislead by the marketing campaign to believe it's some kind of horrror/suspense movie. The first 30 minutes certainly set the framework for it but then the movie goes in a completely different direction. In short, a 20-something is sent a package by an 8 year old girl named Abby containing a painting of a picture he took for a newspaper. Eventually he becomes tangled in a penpal/email/Facebook/texting friendship with Abby, her mother Angela, and her older sister Megan. I won't say anything else but it's a very interesting story (shot documentary style) that develops in very smart, unflinching ways. The acting is superb, my only nitpick was that the movie felt like it was treading water for the last 20 minutes. Still enjoyed it a lot though.

The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010)

5/10 This was my first Manoel de Oliveira film. I figured the guy is 102 years old, might as well get started while he's still alive. But really I was disappointed. The plot is a young photographer summoned to photograph the body of the recently deceased Angelica. Soon the photographer's pictures of her seem to come alive and he's being visited by her in his dreams (or are they?). The movie is beautifully shot and often feels like a visual artifact from the 60's (in a good way) and de Oliveira's stoic direction is pitch perfect. However the story is largely uninteresting, the dream sequences are corny, and the ending is milquetoast. Basically I wanted to like this one a lot more than I did, but I won't let it sour me on the rest of the director's oeuvre.

The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

9/10
I was really, fully in the grips of this movie from start to finish. I found everything about it absolutely fascinating. If it doesn't win Best Adapted Screenplay I'm going to be shocked. About the only minor fault I could find with it is that sometimes the movie feels just a little too...stylized? Glamorous? Something like that. But it's a small nitpick because everything really was great - the story, the dialogue, the music, the acting (Jesse Eisenberg strikes an incredible balance between being sharp and totally aloof at the same time)...I was really impressed.

Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964)

8/10
Pretty cool Japanese horror/family drama from 1964. Centers around an old woman and her daughter-in-law. Waiting for their husbands to return from the war and living in poverty they resort to luring samurai to their deaths and selling their armor and weapons for cash or food. The brash friend of both husbands returns with news of their deaths, and starts up a romance with the daughter in law, much to the old woman's (extreme) consternation. I wasn't as in love with it as I hoped to be but I still enjoyed it a lot. The final scene with the woman and daughter was particularly incredible.

The Town (Ben Affleck, 2010)

5.5/10
The more this film is in my mind (including while I was watching it), the more problems I find with it. Affleck certainly has talent as a director, but contrary to Gone Baby Gone, his source material fails him in a big way. Rarely is anything in a movie so off-putting as to when our anti-hero (here Affleck's bank robber) is saddled with all kinds of tropes to force us to sympathize with him - his mother abandoned him and his father's in prison; he wants to Get Away From This Life and Make a Change; he lives by a flimsy Hollywood code of morality and refuses to kill people; the "mob boss" has him by the balls, he's really handsome and really genuinely loves The Girl - all of this is well and good but he's a criminal, and no amount of prettying up can change that. I'll say no more for fear of spoilers, but needless to say I wasn't a fan of the direction his character went in.
I also thought the central relationship was extremely forced (as far as anything suggested in the movie's timeline, the entire thing takes place in the span of 4 days or so) and various plot points come and go only when needed (an incriminating tattoo or Affleck's character's daughter and ex-girlfriend). The ending is ludicrous, mawkish, and the definition of a movie taking the easy way out.
None of this I can really pin on Affleck - as I said, it's his material that doesn't live up to snuff. In fact the movie has its share of strong points - the acting is all-around top notch, the action scenes are exciting and very well-shot, and the pacing never really slows. A bistro scene involving Affleck, Jeremy Renner and Rebecca Hall that has us all guessing how much each knows about the other is particularly worthy of praise. I wish I could say the same for more of the movie though.

Five (Abbas Kiarostami, 2003)

5/10
(Like 8 1/2, not trying to be cute with my rating...OK maybe a little)
Abbas Kiarostami's Five, aka Five Long Takes Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu, is exactly that - five takes, each averaging about 15 minutes, of various things - a piece of a branch battling with the tide on a beach, a pier and the people walking on it, a beach in winter with dogs frolicking, a bunch of ducks on the beach, and the reflection of the moon in the pitch-black water. Tough thing to rate as it's pretty much what it says on the tin. I can't help but wonder if, like Kiarostami's Shirin, he's playing on the role of the viewer in cinema and the narrative structures that he will inevitably force onto what he's seeing...but then I also can't help but wonder if this wasn't already done by someone like Andy Warhol many years ago. Shirin was far more successful in that regard, Five is little more than a curio.

The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom, 2010)

6.5/10
As before, this movie directed by Michael Winterbottom had a pretty impressive cast (Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson) but went nowhere, but it wasn't really hard to figure out why - the brutal, unflinching, and frankly horrific physical violence perpetrated on the women in the movie is cause for any distributor to run the other way. The movie is based on the Jim Thompson novel of the same name and stays true to his (apparent) gritty, no-B.S. realism. The story essentially is Affleck playing the role of a deputy sheriff named Lou Ford with a need to kill - or abuse, at least. A persistent D.A. eventually uncovers his secret but Ford stays true to his demons to the end. It's an interesting enough, very well-acted story (is Casey Affleck getting the consistent recognition he deserves yet?), but the whole time you can't shake the feeling something is missing - like its main character, the movie is too robotic, too removed, and you never really get sucked in enough into caring what happens. Too bad because it had a lot of potential.