250 Recent Movies You Will Like If You See Film as Art

Here is a fine compendium of short reviews of 250 feature-length movies from 2011 to about 2004. The reviews are edited versions of posts on this blog over the years. A look at the count of movies I reviewed per year clearly shows that I am no longer able to find enough good movies that meet my criteria (below), and I really hate reviewing bad movies. Life is too short. So, I have collected the best of the best from the last few years into a single reference.

The movies chosen are artistic and thoughtful, which does not necessarily mean “serious.” There are plenty of humor, horror, romance, animation, musicals, documentaries, and kids’ movies. When I select movies to watch and review, I look for these two qualities:
A: Is it artistic? Is it good looking, well-executed, well-acted, well-crafted, or innovative? Does it advance the art form of movie making in some way? B: Is it thoughtful? A thoughtful movie has something to say, makes a comment on the world, offers insight into the human condition, challenges the status quo, puts a new twist on old idea, rethinks history, raises questions, highlights injustice, points out absurdity.

As regular readers know, my reviews are opinionated, but evidence-based, which means I give reasons for my opinions, so you can estimate for yourself if I am being fair and reasonable. Many of these movies are not mainstream box office hits, but if you appreciate film as an art form, you will find a lot to like.

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The Man Who Came Back: Grade F

F
The Man Who Came Back (2008)
Eric Braeden, James Patrick Stuart, George Kennedy, Armand Assante; Co-writer and Director Glen Pitre.

I don’t normally take the trouble to review movies that I don’t feel have anything to offer, but this one fails in so many interesting ways that it might be worth talking about. In the 1860’s right after the Civil War a plantation supervisor (Braeden) speaks to the plantation boss (Kennedy) about how his arrogant son (Stuart) apparently has not received the memo that the slaves are free, and has been treating them cruelly. The boss fires the super on the spot for being an abject nigger lover and puts the arrogant son in charge instead.

In fact, the old cowboy is then accused of killing one of the black men in a sort of Crossbow Incident scene. The accusation is a fabrication, but everybody backs up the evil boss and his son. To make things about as mean as they could be, the evil son cages the super and makes him watch as he and his men rape his wife and throw his young boy down a well. That would make anybody mad, for sure. The old cowboy escapes from territorial prison, after several direct visual quotations from Cool Hand Luke, and goes back to town for revenge, killing at least half a dozen of the ordinary townsfolk who falsely spoke against him and of course the plantation owner and his son.

I love a revenge story and I enjoy a good western so I had hoped this would be along the lines of the terrific Steve McQueen film, Nevada Smith (1966). And maybe it is vaguely like that in structure, but there is no drama here. The lead cowboy, Braeden, has only one look, a stoneface gaze with head tipped down, eyes staring from under furrowed brow. It’s a good look, but it’s his only one. Also he rides a horse well, I’ll give him that. Despite being in his 60’s the character can absorb a severe beating without consequence and punch out a man half his age, not too believably however.

Kennedy gives an admirable performance with the stereotype part he has, but that’s not enough to hold up the whole picture. Assante has the perfect look of a sonofabitch cowboy, almost like Lee Van Cleef, but without the acting ability.

It takes an hour to get to the revenge part of the story but the prelude is so over the top it is ridiculous. A ten minute scene would have motivated the revenge. In the last half, Braeden casually walks up to each citizen and kills him. He is not tricky or stealthy. There is no tension, no hunt, no mystery. He doesn’t give a speech, the victims don’t plead. The townspeople seem disinterested. It’s just boring. Wow. How could a story like that be boring? That is aggressively bad writing and worse directing.

The costumes are ludicrous. All are spotless, new, perfectly stitched, pressed and starched, a stupid error, but also they are very fancy fine clothes, with many topcoats in identical shades of implausible purple. How could something like that happen? Was nobody in charge? Props are shiny museum pieces. Anachronisms abound. Slaves speak modern English. Buildings are built with modern lumber. The whore has tons of modern makeup, professional hair color and lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. Was this supposed to be a historical drama or not? The visuals are unimaginative, grainy, set-bound, and give no sense of time and place. Sound is muddy.

Oh well, that’s enough. There is nothing good about the movie, but oddly, it seems like it was a sincere attempt. I wonder how a movie like this gets made.

Valkyrie: Grade D

D
Valkyrie (2008)
Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branaugh, Tom Wilkinson, Terrence Stamp, Eddie Izzard; Director Bryan Singer.

Cruise is Claus von Stauffenberg, the Nazi colonel who led the 15th and final plot to assassinate Hitler during WWII. The plot fails and he is shot. The movie relies on general historical knowledge, general interest in Nazis, and on some big name stars to keep you interested but it barely does. There is virtually no dramatic tension in the film. The bomb is in a brief case so there are not even any red LED numbers counting down. Most of the movie is taken up with bureaucratic infighting and negotiations among the Nazi officer corps (“Are you with us or not?”). The characters are flat and the acting mediocre, even by Branaugh. Wilkinson gives the best performance but he is swamped by swooping cameras and over-lit sets. Direction looks like made-for-TV. CGI effects are noticeably weak. Sets and costumes are immaculately clean and shiny, and nearly the whole movie is shot on unconvincing sound stages so we do not have a sense of time and place. The war itself is strictly in the background. Dialog is lame. Cruise’s motivation is simply declared in the beginning, but we don’t know where it comes from because we don’t know who he is. He demonstrates non of his natural wit and style; just speaks his lines on cue. Pounding heartbeat music tries to inject some drama. The period vehicles are nice to look at, and the story plods along slowly but steadily. There is just enough color and movement to save the movie from utter disaster.

While She Was Out: Grade F

F
While She Was Out (2008)
Kim Basinger, Lukas Haas; Co-writer and Director Susan Montford.

Basinger is an ordinary suburban housewife who can’t find a parking spot at a shopping mall at Christmas. She is annoyed by a big old car taking up two spaces and leaves a hostile note on its windshield. When she comes out of the mall, the owners of that car are waiting for her, four young punks who surround her with hypermacho lip. A mall guard intervenes and they shoot him dead. Basinger jumps in her car and for some reason flees to an uncompleted housing construction project, where she grabs the metal toolbox from her car and hides in some framing. The toolbox miraculously has no mass and she carries it effortlessly. The punks chase her into the nearby woods, improbably a mature Northwest rain forest. As they pursue her through the inexplicably well lit night forest, she manages to ambush them one at a time, killing them with tools far too large to have come out of the box. On the last bad guy, she uses her feminine wiles to get him sexually distracted, which works, despite the large difference in their ages.

Basinger has had some amazing cosmetic surgery that makes her appear thirtyish if you don’t look too closely at the grotesquely sculpted features or at her 55 year old hands. Still, she is far from being a female Bruce Willis, which I guess is what I was hoping for. The acting is abominable, especially by the young men, in keeping with the brain-dead story. Costumes, sets, music, directing, scenery, cinematography – all are so bad that you keep watching in horrified fascination, but that doesn’t make it worth your time.

Traitor: Grade B

B
Traitor (2008)
Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Saïd Taghmaoui, Jeff Daniels; Co-Writer & Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff.

You’ll need motion-sickness medication to watch this movie. The camera swoops, spins, tracks and zooms dizzyingly in every scene. Fast pans move from one close up shot to another so quickly you can hardly tell what you’re looking at and if you try to follow the motion your eyes will cross. The movements are completely gratuitous, seriously detracting from the film. When it is not swooping around, the camera is hand held, jumping and jittering wildly with the action but incomprehensibly, shot from no consistent point of view. This syntax of camera-as-character is common in television, but usually done more intelligently. But all is not lost, for in the last 1/3 of the film they apparently changed personnel and the movie settles down to a much more enjoyable, professional looking work. You just have to make it through the first hour.

And you should try, for this is basically a good movie. Don Cheadle is a deep undercover agent for the US Government, penetrating a terrorist organization based in Yemen. His undercover status is not revealed for the first 45 minutes, (although I guessed it right away -- he is Don Cheadle, after all), so we first get to know him as an explosives dealer who also instructs his customers in making bombs and suicide vests. Taghmaoui is the militant Islamic extremist who Cheadle befriends. To earn his bones, Cheadle must blow up an American embassy in Europe, which causes him a crisis of conscience, and we learn that his character really is a devout Muslim, not just an undercover pretender. Acting is consistently superb throughout. The dialog is intelligent and the story is engaging. However, sets, scenes and costumes are so self-consciously overdone that they are unconvincing. It is courageous of Cheadle to put his career at risk by playing an Islamic terrorist but he plays it extremely well, so much so that we can understand the point of view of the anti-American Islamic extremists. Despite its flaws, good acting and a good story make the move worth seeing.

Vampire Diary: Grade C

C
Vampire Diary (2007)
Anna Walton, Morvin Macbeth; Directors Mark James & Phil O’Shea.

I have questions about vampires and this movie did nothing to clear them up. Aren’t vampires immortal? So what is their fear of being captured or shot by the police? And how nutritious is an exclusive blood diet, anyway? Don’t vampires need the basic 20 amino acids? This movie introduces a whole new set of questions about vampire reproduction as well.

Vicki is a relatively good-looking young woman, in a dark, Addams Family sort of way. She crashes vampire parties held by Gothic teens who wear false fangs and use loads of eye and mouth makeup. Vicki falls in love with Holly, the host of a vampire party, and eventually confesses that she is a real vampire, that she is pregnant, and that she is hungry. Holly shows about sixty seconds of skepticism then vows to help her lover get what she needs. They start hunting derelict drunks, but Vicki complains about the low quality blood, so they have to move upscale. Details are sketchy, but some members of the party crowd turn up dead. The city-wide hunt is on for the “Vampire Killer.”

But the movie is really about the relationship between the two women and the lengths to which Holly will go to protect and sustain her friend. Most disturbing is how the film justifies and ennobles self-mutilation, which is actually a severe psychopathology. Holly cuts herself with a razor blade to feed her lover. Camera work is dark, grainy, shaky hand-held video, and reflects the fact that many young people have video cameras going all the time, objectifying their lives instead of living them, another disturbing trend. Editing is primitive, directing is clunky. I could not evaluate the music, which is from a youth culture I don’t know. But the acting was actually pretty good. As she hands her new baby to Holly before the police get there, Vicki says that she is not really a vampire, just a psychopathic serial killer. There are no vampires, she says. That would have been a good ambiguity to play throughout the story instead of throwing it in at the last minute. Despite the mediocre writing and very low production values, the result is mildly interesting, not too bad.

La Vie En Rose: Grade D

D
La Vie En Rose (2007)
Marion Cotillard, Sylvie Testud; Co-writer and director: Oliver Dahan. (French, subtitled)

Cotillard gives a convincing portrayal of French chanteuse Edith Piaf, who was enormously popular in Europe and America from the 1930’s through the 1950’s. My high school French teacher used to play her records for the class, so the songs are familiar and nostalgic to me, although I did not realize until I saw this movie how perfect Piaf’s diction really was and that is probably why the teacher played the tunes. Cotillard lip syncs the songs perfectly, and the songs and “the voice” are the reason I give this movie a pass. There is nothing else to recommend it. Nearly every scene is indoors and the lighting is so dark, as if everything were lit by cheap candles. Walls are green and brown. Costumes are green and brown. Shadows are deep. Look at the DVD cover. The whole look of the movie is murky and muddy. Though Piaf sang through two world wars, there is little sense of history or geography. The unnecessarily zooming and panning camera is often distracting to the action. Acting is only adequate. Even Cotillard, who gives a 100% performance, is bound by the tedious, melodramatic script. The narrative alternates between scenes of adult aging and childhood flashbacks, which is interesting but goes on for an unjustified 2 hours and 10 minutes, with numerous scenes apparently designed only for tear-jerk potential. She was raised in a brothel, how awful. As a child she was blinded by an eye inflammation for months, how awful. But these scenes and many like them contribute nothing to our understanding of the character. The adult Piaf never refers to them, and the filmmakers never suggest that they had any effect whatsoever on her. So why are they in the movie? At the end of this biopic, I know next to nothing about Edith Piaf except she liked to sing, drank too much, and was lonesome. That could describe a lot of people. There is nothing here that explains the great Piaf-Piaf.