Almayer's Folly (Chantal Akerman, 2011)

8.5/10
Not a big hit judging from the people streaming towards the exits throughout the movie, but I liked it a lot. It's a hard movie to peg - it starts out almost like a murder/mystery thriller, then becomes something like a family drama, all taking place in or around Malaysia (although filming took place in Cambodia and none of the actors speak Malaysian despite claiming to be Malaysian - yeah it's weird). The film is very slow, is bizarrely paced, and wholly unpretentious - but I was hooked from beginning to end.

Vinyl: Tales from the Vienna Underground (Andrew Standen-Raz, 2010)

4/10
Maybe I was disappointed with what this wasn't rather than what it was. There's some stuff in the Viennese arts that interests me from Hermann Nitsch up through Christian Fennesz, but almost none of it was touched on in this documentary, which instead focused on the current Viennese techno "movement", if it can be called such. Unfortunately the movie has a tremendously narrow scope - no attempt is given to explain why this movement is more important than any similar scenes around the world, where it came from, and what it means. A disappointing amount of face time has been given to musicians who can only spew out horrific clichés like "vinyl is like opening a book, CDs are cold and plastic" and "the question all artists have to ask themselves is what's more important - making money or having your music heard". Clichés that, in any event, aren't even Viennese-centric, so who cares? Probably a documentary worth watching on Youtube if you're already a fan of the artists; definitely not one for an outsider to see in a theatre.

Monsieur Lazhar (Philippe Falardeau, 2011)

7.5/10
Canada's entry for this year's Best Foreign Film feels, for all intents and purposes, like an entry for Best Foreign Film. It's cliché, yes, but it does a lot of things right - it's honest, funny, sad, heart-warming, and thought-provoking. It's not anything close to a revelation but it's very enjoyable for the 2 hours it's on the screen.

Take This Waltz (Sarah Polley, 2011)

5.5/10
Sarah Polley's sophomore directing effort shoots for mainstream with Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen as a married couple, with the focus on Williams' budding interest in a next-door neighbor, who offers her a release from her "childish" domestic life. It's not a new story, and it pales in a big way compared to a movie like Blue Valentine. The script (written by Polley) needs work, as some of the dialogue is brutally heavy-handed. But my biggest complaint was with Williams' character - she's not so much quirky as she is a full-blown sociopath, and it's hard to identify with her in any way. The movie is also very geared towards a female audience; as a male I felt pretty alienated at times.

Kotoko (Shinya Tsukamoto, 2011)

6/10
Shinya Tsukamoto's newest, about a mother constantly on the brink of insanity - seeing double (literally seeing 2 people instead of 1), cutting herself (not to die but in "admiration of the body's will to live"), abusing her lover who it turns out may not actually exist, and having nightmares/fantasizing about hurting her young son. I still don't know what any of this built to, aside from maybe an insight into the mind of a woman who could kill her own offspring...it's pretty violent and at times oddly funny, but not entirely insightful.

Land of Oblivion (Michale Boganim, 2011)

6.5/10
Land of Oblivion follows two stories taking place on April 26th, 1986 - a woman and man getting married, and an engineer who works at the Chernobyl power plant. Of course, that's the date the reactor melts down. After the disaster, the movie picks up 10 years later - the wife, now a widow, is a tour guide in Pripyat, and the engineer's son is sneaking into the exclusion zone to try and locate his father. To be honest, the stories aren't interesting, but the filming in and around Pripyat is pretty great, for someone as interested in the Chernobyl disaster as I am.

House of Tolerance (Bertrand Bonello, 2011)

8/10
An ultra-slick French film about the last days of a brothel in Paris, it's almost obscenely over the top in style but I guess that's fitting, considering the time. The ensemble is great, as you really get a sense of each individual woman's personality. There's a fantastic scene with (anachronistically enough) the Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin" that really won the movie over for me.