Personally I prefer the new Bob Altman (The Player, Gosford Park) to the old one (3 Women, Nashville, McCabe & Mrs. Miller). But since there are exceptions (I hated Short Cuts but liked California Split) I watched this one with an open mind.

It has the usual Altman tricks, including lots of distracting background conversation, kooky characters, and a freewheeling narrative style. Overall though I didn't quite see it as the great anti-war film that it is so often labelled. I would argue that the film is anti-draft rather than anti-war, with the message being that the draftees are just as bad for the army as the army is bad for the draftees. As far as the "war is crazy" genre is concerned, I'll stick with Dr. Strangelove and Apocalypse Now.

6/10

A quirky little film about the secret lives of Oxford professors. According to the screenwriter they do little professing there, but lots of boating, tennis-playing, drinking, and of course, sleeping around with their students. Although I felt the story was a bit contrived, the movie is in terms of its technique one of the most brilliantly made pieces I've seen in a while.

7/10

This is the fourth Kiarostami pic I've seen, and by far the most entertaining of the four-- though in all fairness entertainment is not really what he seems to be after. In its look it is most similar to "Close-Up." As with the films of Antonioni, the visual background is just as interesting as the main action.

The whole movie is a youngish Iranian woman driving around the streets of Tehran. The camera focuses on either the passenger or driver side, sometimes at great length. (One notices that no matter how modernized Iran has become, there seem to be no seat-belt laws there yet.) She has ten different converations with her passengers, including four with her cute but spoiled son whom she shares with her recently divorced husband. The conversations, amazingly, never feel at all contrived; overall this gives the movie a sense of immediacy that must have been incredibly hard to pull off.

8/10

A weird little film, and all the more so for being silent (mostly) and shot in a shimmering black and white. If there's anything like it today, it would be the montage sequences in the American version of "The Ring," or any of the films of David Lynch. The latter especially: the narrative is nonlinear and open to multiple interpretations, there are bizarro looking characters throughout, and the lines between dream, myth, and reality are constantly being blurred.

The most memorable sequence is when the young Allan Grey goes wandering from the inn to the chateau, and along the way stumbles upon a whole assortment of oddities. The ending too is hard to forget (or figure out, for that matter).

The DVD version I saw also included a bit of animation from 1934 called "The Mascot," by one Wladyslaw Starewicz. This was crazily inventive and thoroughly enjoyable--and also probably the only movie ever made about a stuffed dog visiting Hell.

8/10

French film about "la culpabilite," which I sat down to watch with some trepidation. For one thing, it won a prize at Cannes. For another, it was a movie that a lot of critics loved and a lot of ordinary people hated. These are usually two foolproof signs. (A third should have been that it was by the same guy who did "The Piano Teacher".)

About halfway through Caché that famous quote (Goethe? Keats?) about how "we hate art that has designs on us" popped into my head and wouldn't leave. Now I don't entirely agree with the quote, but it definitely applies here. Any film that is concerned with blatantly moralizing should, I think, make sure it has the storytelling to match. But Caché unfortunately is so much about the former that it forgets about the latter.

In an interview added on the DVD the director Haneke contrasted the truthfulness of his film with the lack thereof in "American" cinema. But in fact, if there is any film Caché reminded me of it is the recent "Crash." In both, the plot is so contrived to fit the "message" that the story eventually ends up suffering for it.

This aside, not an entirely awful film. Great acting, and before the urge to preach kicks in the storyline is actually pretty engaging.

5/10