Yellow, by Cassavetes.

Still from www.yellowthefilm.com 

The movie is a labor of love--his romantic companion plays the lead and mom/stepmom? plays somebody--but it spins out of control as the life of the lead character. Styles mix freely--All That Jazz'-style singing and dancing numbers appear amidst masked cartoon characters.

The setting is surreal--assistant teacher in LA lives in a condo with a swimming pool adorned by artwork, wears designer dresses (and that is despite her drug habit) and her pedicure is impeccable even when she goes miles in Oklahoma desert over the rail tracks. Her debilitated unemployed sister played by Sienna Miller drives a Jaguar and the heroine is not afraid to leave children to her when she departs. Cassavetes cannot be accused of inattention to detail--one scene includes one slowly falling piece of torn bill in total defiance of gravity--but the director, as well as the author, should not love the characters he creates otherwise they take control over him.

Interstellar. Christopher Nolan.

This movie (metaphor of another critic) is a cross between "Inception" and "Gravity" and not in a good way. Presumption is ridiculous: the civilization, which builds starships cannot genetically modify humans or at least corn to survive in lower-oxygen atmosphere. Yet, the same ubiquitous corn appears later on a space station. If it grows at the orbit of Saturn, can they grow enough on Earth? Space travel progresses but medical technology... not so fast. The whole movie is a mess of special effects, thin philosophy and even its battery of A-list actors cannot rescue it from a free fall.

Birdman by Inarritu

A really good movie. Mexican director out-New Yorked New Yorkers. Has nothing in it reflecting on the subject of this blog.

Magic in the Moonlight

Woody Allen's version of "Pygmalion" is not a moralistic flop like his Blue Jasmine, but it is, in words of one critic, "undercooked." Dialogues are stale; characters are underdeveloped. It is fair entertainment for boring Saturday evening; that's about that. Talents of Colin Firth and Emma Stone (I did not know she can act) are fit into cut-out characters of this movie. Because Ms. Stone is obviously too old to serve as Allen's romantic companion for the shoot, he hired three female assistants to Colin Firth, which appear only in one episode of the movie.

Calvary

Director's desire to follow passions of Christ as close as possible deformed psychological veracity of the characters in the movie. But the actors' play is sublime.

A Most Wanted Man by Anton Corbijn.

A Most Wanted Man by Anton Corbijn is a most wanted antidote to the brilliant war propaganda series by Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker and, especially, Zero Dark Thirty). Being more-or-less standard as cinematic fare it is great as a polemic piece about the modern warfare. Namely, the careerists aided and abetted by mindless squares always win leaving death and destruction in their wake.

         The hero played by untimely gone P. S. Hoffman represents traditional intelligence/police methods: hiring of recruits, imbibing them with sense of the mission and internalizing it with them, etc. etc. When he is about to let off the hook a broken Chechen terrorist, a crooked Swiss banker and a mullah willing to look the other way to terrorist funding going through his charities in order to get to the really big fish in the terror international, a CIA woman with steely eyes [1]  and German prosecutors arrest them all. Recruited son of the cleric is at large and will obviously become a jihadist if be believe the logic of the movie.


[1] She is played by Robin Wright and obviously modeled on the legions of State Department/CIA/NSC banshees: Wendy Sherman, Vicky Nuland, Condi Rice, Samantha Power, Meghan O'Sullivan, etc. etc.

Lucy

Whatever illogical turns this hack job of Luc Besson takes (enhanced brain capacity allows its bearer to violate laws of physics, there is a need to secretly smuggle the substance absolutely unknown to anybody, etc.) the most improbable of all is that lower-middle class girl from Pennsylvania drives the car in Paris for the first time in her life.