I enjoy the films of Jim Jarmusch despite his hipster credentials and his occasional beatnik-pandering misfires like "Coffee and Cigarettes." My fascination started with "Stranger than Paradise" (1984): a Hungarian girl goes to visit her cousin who lives in the ugliest apartment in the ugliest part of New York City; then the cousin and his best friend go to visit the Hungarian girl who now lives in the ugliest house in the ugliest part of Cleveland; then all three of them take a road trip and end up at the ugliest hotel in the ugliest part of Florida. In short, a very important and decade-defining film in which nothing at all happened.

Broken Flowers is in a similiar vein--all the locations, for instance, look like places you've been before. It may be even better because it has Bill Murray in it. At first it seems to actually have a plot, but much like Antonioni's "L'Avventura", the plot serves to get things going and then gradually recedes from view in favor of other themes. Which here seem to have to do largely with growing older and not wiser. Overall (except for one scene of inexplicable nudity) I'd very much recommend seeing this.

7/10

Bus 174 is the greatest documentary film I have seen. One day in June of 2000, a young Brazilian street kid named Sandro is interrupted by the police while trying to rob a downtown Rio de Janeiro bus. He takes hostages, and the standoff that ensues is transmitted live, and in shockingly close detail, to millions of television viewers all over the country.

What Padilha does, while letting the hostage standoff unfold in front of us via footage collated from the many TV crews present, is to simultaneously retrace the events in Sandro's life that led to the incident on the bus. If this sounds like a recipe for some sort of bleeding-heart exercise in emotional manipulation, don't worry: the reconstruction that takes place is in fact quite detached and analytical, and never lets Sandro off the hook for his actions. Its primary virtue, however, is that it doesn't let anyone else off the hook either.

Padilha has characterized Bus 174 as being about "urban violence in developing countries." But it turns out to be about so much more, including not only many of the major social concerns of our time-- particularly the growing gap between rich and poor--but also deeper metaphysical issues like personal identity, free will, and our ineradicable moral nature. All of these issues are compounded by the fact that the story told here is far beyond what any writer of fiction could possibly construct, with an ending so bizarre and so troubling that it will stick with you for a very long time.

10/10

What's creepier? A face without eyes--or eyes without a face? After long and intense deliberation, apparently, the makers of this film decided on the latter.

Kenneth Turan, one of the only two movie critics I trust (the other is Anthony Lane from the New Yorker), wrote the following: "Once seen, never forgotten, 'Eyes Without a Face' is a film to haunt your dreams. Disturbing, disorienting, quietly terrifying, it's one of the least known of the world's great horror movies and, in its own dark way, a startlingly beautiful and artful piece of cinema as well." So how could I resist?

After seeing it, however, I was a bit underwhelmed. For one thing, the main characters--the doctor, his assistant, and the daughter--are never fully developed in the way you'd want them to be. And why are the cops in the film so stupid? But on the other hand, if you think about the film solely as a sort of twisted fairy tale, a la E.T.A. Hoffman, it is a resounding success.

7/10

"Over the top" is a clever and useful phrase in our language. Strangely enough, however, there seems to be no conventional expression coined solely to capture the vice occupying the other extreme ("opaque" perhaps comes closest, but also has a more general meaning). Is this because being bewilderingly oversubtle is not considered a vice? Or simply because it is much less common?

Spirit of the Beehive raises these questions. It has many virtues as a film, including (1) beautiful Vermeer-like cinematography; (2) great acting by incredibly young children; (3) startling use of the 1931 American version of "Frankenstein". But I have absolutely no clue what any of it was supposed to mean. Apparently it is an allegory about 1940's Spanish politics, though it is baffling to me how so many unconnected elements could be combined into any overarching interpretation at all.

Overall, worth seeing for the above qualities, and for that increasingly rare sensation that a film has completely (and I mean completely) eluded your grasp.

7/10

The Chinese philosopher Mencius has an argument where he says that anyone who sees a little baby lying on the edge of a well has the immediate urge to rescue it from harm. This urge does not come from the desire to be rewarded or to ingratiate oneself with the baby's parents, but simply from the fact that one is human--proof for Mencius that human nature is essentially good.

The Italian movie "I'm Not Scared" is--almost literally--the cinematic equivalent of Mencius' argument. It is a bit slow at times but all in all it adds up to something worth seeing.

7/10