The Distinguished Citizen – 8

Here was a film to think and talk about: how many themes did you detect, and what were they? An Argentine writer, winner of the Nobel in literature, returns to his small home town in the country – why? to bask in his glory, to refresh his imagination, to experience nostalgia? – or does he? (As an introduction to Argentine cinema, this was a nice companion to Neruda.) People greet him on the surface, then turn petty and hostile. They don’t understand him, but does he understand them? He bumbles along in his world of fiction (Oscar Martinez won the Argentine Oscar for Best Actor), finding that he can’t go home anymore – or can he?

Neruda – 7

A poem of a film, with a fat Communist in the lead and a wispy Gael Bernal Garcia as foil and narrator. By constantly using backlighting, director Pablo Larrain conveys the mood and spirit of the 1940s and half the fun is experiencing the people, politics and costumes of that era in Chile (when the movie moves to France in the final minutes it falls flat). From this distance it’s hard to understand the power or importance of Pablo Neruda, or any poet!, and the director is careful not to make him especially heroic. The chase is clearly a fantasy or fiction, and we don’t take anything that happens too seriously. It is, after all, a poem.

The Unknown Girl – 8

A thoughtful, very real examination of guilt, confession and community responsibility from the Belgian masters, the Dardennes brothers. Star Adele Haenel was onscreen the entire time, and I never tired of watching her. The plot toyed with that of a policier, which the directors said they wanted to avoid, but that’s what drove the action and our interest. In the end, though, it was Dr. Jenny’s refusal to let the ‘unknown girl’ pass away unremarked that made everyone else face up to their own responsibility, and that gave a coherence to the story. Kudos (Oscar?) to Haenel, but I don’t think she needed to smoke. (NYFF)

Bright Lights – 5

An overlong, pointless documentary about two aged former film stars – Grey Gardens, anyone? – that is ultimately dispiriting, especially as one of the former film stars, Carrie Fisher, is the daughter of the other. Debbie Reynolds, America’s Sweetheart in the ’50s, is still performing, sort of, on the geriatric circuit; whereas Carrie, famous as Princess Leia, has gone to pot and other drugs and looks awful as she smokes and drinks Cokes. The film is certainly not an advertisement for aging, and you can’t help but wish two actresses who have given so much enjoyment to so many couldn’t have a more refined retirement – or at least have said ‘no’ to the documentarians.

Niagara – 8

It won’t do to compare this 1953 thriller to current movies, but, much as Elevator to the Gallows showed us, it can be tremendously fun to watch well-crafted old movies on the big screen. Director Henry Hathaway showed more than a touch of Hitchcock with his visual clues, but what set him apart was his use of his physical set – in this case the immense and powerful falls of Niagara. The secondary characters were caricatures, but the three leads – Joseph Cotten, Jean Peters and Marilyn Monroe – lived up to reputation. (NYFF)

Little Men – 7.5

Greg Kinnear plays the fumbling father, Jennifer Ehle plays Laura Linney and Paulina Garcia plays the more challenging role (thus, the cigarette smoking) of the dress store owner seeking to avoid eviction by the yuppie couple moving into the Brooklyn brownstone that houses her boutique. The core of Ira Sachs’s movie, though, is the sons, two 13-year-olds who are testing their families, each other, and themselves. Their relationship recalls the recent French film, Microbe and Gasoline, although the American version, surprisingly, is far more realistic. Nothing big here, but thoughtful.

Elevator to the Gallows – 8

A wonderfully moody feature debut by the great Louis Malle from 1958, filmed in black-and-white – mostly black – with a perfectly adapted score by Miles Davis and sultry performances by Jeanne Moreau and Maurice Ronet. The Hitchcockian tension begins with the opening shot and never lets up; the plot unfolds like a textbook tragedy – there is no way out; and the only smile comes from the cocky German tourist before he gets blown away. Movies (and the world) were slower paced back in the ’50s, but their power was just as great.

Lo and Behold – 4

Two hours of my life I won’t get back, or more appropriately, two hours I could have spent more profitably surfing the web. Werner Herzog’s subtitled “Reveries of the Connected World” was a bunch of “reveries,” all right, but there wasn’t much connection. Herzog is one of my all-time favorite directors, and his sense of open wonder is usually refreshing, but here it came across as naivete, if not ignorance, as he asked his internet-savvy subjects such unhelpful questions as, “Do computers dream?” and “Could your soccer-playing robot discs beat Brazil?” The common thread through Herzog cinema is the oddball, and that continued here, in spades. On one end of the spectrum were the fruitcakes, cited as examples of the Internet’s harmful effects; on the other were computer geniuses, who only appeared odd because Herzog clearly had no idea what they were talking about. Anyone who went to this movie hoping to understand what the Internet is or how it works would walk out as baffled as ever. Anyone who was already worried about the fate of our civilization, however, would have added another potential cataclysm to fret: solar flares.

Zero Days – 6.5

The story is better than the storytelling. How many people do we need to hear saying, “I can’t comment,” in order to grasp that a virus to destabilize Iran’s nuclear program is a state secret, an obvious fact to begin with. Then there is the problem of how to film computer code, which supplies the main visual for the movie’s first half. With so much shrouded in mystery, telling the story out of chronological order doesn’t help either. What saves the film is its final quarter, in which far-reaching questions about cyberwarfare and secrecy are raised: questions that perhaps have no answer.

Microbe and Gasoline – 5

A summer piffle – watchable mainly because it was French. Nothing was believable, or terribly charming, if that was the justification. Two young boys on an adventure, but it didn’t make us care about them or identify with any of their experiences. How much better was Mud, for example.