Prisoners

French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve's "Prisoners" is an almost in every way commendable dramatic thriller: plot-driven, performance-heavy, solid old-fashioned storytelling of which there should only be more. But...but... it's just so maddeningly, distractingly imperfect on so many levels! The script is plagued by plausibility issues as people keep looking the wrong places and asking the bad questions. Jake Gyllenhaal's detective character is especially messily written, sabotaging the emotional involvement of the audience and the necessary balance in a narrative about choices. In retrospect the film is also faultily structured. Clocking in at 158 min, way too much time is spent on red herrings and blunt morality tests. There are weak links in the overall impressive cast (hello, Terrence Howard), but Hugh Jackman brings great volatility and vulnerability to the central figure and Viola Davis, in her sadly limited role, is divine.

This movie is not nearly as strong as Villeneuve's last feature "Incendies" (my Top 10 of 2011), but when it works, it's quite the adrenaline ride. The last hour, with its goosebumps-worthy big reveal, is intense as hell.

Short takes

Much like good movies, bad movies also cross national boundaries and transcend cultural differences, as I was so forcefully reminded by recent viewing experiences.

The American indie "Adore" by French director Anne Fontaine, about two life-long girlfriends who fall for each other's sons, is so clunkily written and ineptly directed it elicits bonafide cringes and unintentional laughs at virtually every turn of events. Despite its source material by esteemed author Doris Lessing and a Sundance premiere earlier this year, a sordid and thoroughly absurd affair.

Premiering in competition (!) at Cannes last year, writer/director Sang-soo Im's erotic thriller "돈의 맛 (The Taste of Money)", supposedly about the moral decadence, familial and political powerplay of the über-rich in South Korea, crashes very soon on its own sleek, polished production design thanks to a half-baked, wildly unfocused plot, the equally erratic, borderline schizophrenic tone and some truly awful acting.

Without a bow at any film festival and displaying no aspiration for critical appreciation whatsoever, German director/writer/actor Til Schweiger's comedy "Kokowääh 2" reaches nonetheless a new low in the star's ever stinkier filmography. Incoherent, tasteless, deadly unfunny in just about every respect, this movie is so soul-crushingly bad the only thing more embarrassing/depressing than watching the tired Til Schweiger-shtick is knowing the German audience was taken hostage yet again, making it the local box-office champ of the year so far.

L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake)

With just "L'inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake)" and "La vie d'Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color)", this year's French cinema has covered graphic, unsimulated sex scenes featuring all gender combinations- something for everybody!

Other than the shared easy carnality, though, Alain Guiraudie's lakeside thriller pales in comparison to the Palme d'Or winner as its underwritten script, lackluster pacing and mostly wooden performances fail to provide it with any sustained tension or noteworthy thrill. There's a nice twist in the final act I didn't see coming and the last shot of the movie, dark, blank, pregnant with a sense of deplorable desperation, is super smart, but pour moi it's too little too late.

The Congress

Tackling subjects as profound and diverse as the future of cinema, the value of personality, the merit of choice, the essence of existence and employing about as many expressive means to tell its tale, Israeli director Ari Folman's sci-fi extravaganza "The Congress" is too ambitious for its own good. The result is an in every way uneven film that's glacial and confounding at times and stupendously inspired at others.
While definitely not for everybody, this is a movie that, in its best moments, truly takes creative flight and soars. Personal highlights include the scenes where the live-action part of the movie slides into animation (at about the 45th-min mark, a bit late by all accounts) and where the process is reversed towards the end. Delightfully crude, hand-drawn cartoons lend the first a feeling of absolute liberation while the full weight of reality and disillusionment packs the second.

Singular, meditative, narratively and artistically challenging, whether you enjoy the film or not, it's likely to be your trippiest experience at the cinemas in a long time.

Feuchtgebiete

German sex comedy "Feuchtgebiete (Wetlands)", based on the scandalous bestseller by Charlotte Roche, is a raging, vile, no-holds-barred trip down a young girl's dirty fantasy and nasty experiments à la Amélie Poulain on crack.

Despite its fixation on orifices, bodily fluids and unsavory food-anatomy comparisons, the movie looks fetching as director David Wnendt pulls out all the stops to visually recreate the restless state of a damaged mind. Photographed with light in all intensities and colors of every shade, blood, pus and excrement explode onto the screen in a whirlwind of kaleidoscopic ugliness that disgusts yet entrances. Lead actress Carla Juri uses her disarming ease and naïveté to great advantage but is limited in a role that often feels petulant and one-note. The same could be said about the movie as a whole, which never quite shakes an episodic slightness to its narrative and suffers from a final act that has its touching moments of clarity but is altogether forced and clumsy. For all its ostentatious provocativeness, this movie seldom hits the right spot.

The Bling Ring

There are rare moments in Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring" where we kind of get a peek inside the anemic, barren minds of the famed teen burglars who robbed Hollywood celebrities, but by and large the movie is unexpectedly flat. While it's not as downright lethargic as "Somewhere", it also lacks the sparkly energy of "Marie Antoinette" or the hypnotic intimacy of "Lost in Translation" and "The Virgin Suicides". Of course the story is supposed to be about the ignorance and superficiality of kids raised under the paparazzi culture, but that doesn't change the fact that the script just screams emptiness and banality most of the time. Driven by not much more than a voyeuristic kick that also loses steam due to repetitiveness, the movie offers otherwise no noteworthy performance and is visually and sonically unremarkable.

Second dud in a row. Win me back, Sofia!

La grande belezza

It does move quite slowly and its protagonist's philosophical, wise-sounding musings on life, journeys, endings lose much of their impact to a rather fragmented, less-than-coherent narrative, but Italian director Paolo Sorrentino's "La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty)" delivered what its title promises, giving us impressions of Rome so stunning they pin you to your seat with their grandeur and lyricism. Palaces, gardens, artworks drenched in candlelight, canals bathing in the morning sun, the camera touches ancient ruins and modern-day debauchery depicted here with equal loving care and dazzles again and again (there are trees in this movie that look like they belong in a museum).

Among a solid cast, Toni Servillo owns the role of Jep down to every weary blink. Too bad the director seems swamped by the task of communicating so many thoughts, observations, late-life reflections through him that it ended up hurting the character's authenticity and persuasiveness.