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.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009)

7/10
Decided to see the Swedish adaptation before the U.S. one. If I could describe it in one word, it would be "functional". It does a decent job all around. While I agree with a lot of the necessary storyline cuts and alterations, I do feel like something got lost along the way. I also felt there was zero chemistry between the two leads, and the movie actually starts to sag when they meet instead of crackling as in the book. The direction is average, and I'm looking forward to seeing the style and visual flair Fincher will bring to his adaptation.

My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011)

7/10
This is a pretty good movie boasting another great performance from Michelle Williams - that her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe never descends into cartoonishness (despite Monroe's cartoonish personality) and constantly treads a very nuanced line between sexy and childish, cleverness and borderline outright stupidity, is a testament to both Williams' abilities and the screenplay. I suppose if I had one major complaint, it's that there just isn't a lot here - it's a pretty fluff movie, and when you start to wonder how such a thin story got made into a major motion picture, it's not hard to imagine someone pitching this as pure Oscar-bait for the Monroe role alone. Luckily they were able to create a sufficiently entertaining movie around it, however.