Sister (L’Enfant d’en Haut) – 4

Perfectly well made movie, and Lea Seydoux was luscious, but I spent the whole film hoping, waiting for the little thief to get caught, and the last half-hour waiting for the film to end. I don’t know if we were supposed to feel sympathy for the poor 12-year-old Simon, “forced” to steal in order to eat, but my sympathies were with the skiers who came out of their lunch breaks to find their skis and goggles missing. With nothing to root for, I just wanted the whole thing to go away.

Disconnect – 8

The problems are well-worn: a journalist’s too-close relationship with a source; a couple’s inability to communicate after a child is lost; teens hazing a classmate who is ‘different’; parents and teens navigating the shoals of adolescence. What is new is the setting, the world of the web and social media, where communication is typed and no one sees, or even really knows, the person you are dealing with.  Identity theft, online pornography and viral media make this movie seem oh-so-of-the-moment (hello, Manti Te’o!), but the underlying themes, needs and frustrations have been with us forever. This film was powerful, using Crash-like parallel stories that started quietly then built to a violent crescendo that resolved nothing but somehow satisfied.

Habibi – 6.5

An earnest and sympathetic look at the plight of two Palestinian lovers, deprived of their relationship, and ultimately their lives, by the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and stranglehold on Gaza. The male lead, unfortunately, was not appealing by Western standards, nor was his conduct particularly commendable. His female love, on the other hand, was attractive, smart and fiercely independent – all qualities we could identify with – but there was nothing terribly original about her plight or the obstacles she ran into. What was original in this bare-bones production (there was no background score, for example) was its unflinching presentation of the Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people. (MFF)

Where Do We Go Now? – 8

A comic but true-to-the-core depiction of Arab society in a small village where everyone knows, and gossips about, everyone else, usually at high volume. Meanwhile, below (or above) the frivolous surface, this smart movie presents the dichotomies of man and woman, love and hate, Christian and Muslim, life and death. All the actors are convincingly homespun, allowing the focus to rest on the pretty cafe-keeper, played by Nadine Labiki, the movie’s director. In this isolated Lebanese village, we are shown the need, and a way, to overcome petty divisions, even if we still believe this will not work in the bigger world out there.

J’Aime Regarder Les Filles – 6.5

A very French film about the working-class student who is madly in love with the rich beauty until he wakes up to/with the slightly less beautiful girl who has been vainly chasing him. What either girl sees in Primo is a total mystery unless they, like the director, see him as a reincarnation of Jean Pierre Leaud. The total fixation on young love, despite vague socio-economic-political rumblings in the 1981 background, is also very French, if a bit vapid.

Darling Companion – 8

Kevin Kline is the best comedic actor of his generation, Diane Keaton is an unfailingly charming but a little ditsy comedienne, and together they anchor this hilarious but touching Big Chill-at-60 reprise by director Lawrence Kasdan. The plot is ostensibly about a lost dog, Freeway, but I needn’t have worried: Freeway is lost for much of the film, the McMuffin, if you will, for the deeper story about relationships among the three couples. None are easy, all require quite a bit of faith as well as work, and this is what makes the world go ’round. With lots of witty lines thrown in.

Zambezi – 1

Two second-rate TV ‘specials’ covering the upper and lower halves of the river, but nothing distinguished one part of the river from another, or this river from any other. Shots of animals often had no connection to the river, in any case, and were nothing we didn’t see in better films 20 years ago. A pointless, repetitive, uninformative nature documentary.

Troubadours – 1

This was such an annoying film I’d give it a negative score if I could. Different rock eras were conflated and confused, and no legitimate story line emerged. The filmmaker took his access to the James Taylor/Carole King Reunion Tour and purported to base the story of the Troubadour nightclub in L.A. on it, but he wound up making a movie about Taylor and King. Greater talents like Elton John, Jackson Browne and the Eagles were reduced to subservient cameos, and telling a story of “singer-songwriters” without Bob Dylan is as misguided as basing a movie about the L.A. scene on a mildly boring singer from Massachusetts.

Nostalgia for Light – 3

If there was a connection between Chilean astronomers searching out celestial bodies and Chilean widows digging nearby in the Atacama Desert for bones of the “disappeared,” I slept through it, one story being told as slowly and undramatically as the other. The widows’ quest struck me as particularly pointless, but that may just be me.

The Still Moment – 5.5

This is the kiond of film a film festival is for: totally uncommercial, produced on a used shoestring, aimed at a mini-market – but made with such singleness of purpose that its message comes through pure and clear (unlike Nostalgia, Zambezi and Troubadours, below). The message: surfing is about oneness with nature, with commitment and abandonment producing, if lucky, “the still moment.” The medium: scratchy, backlit interviews with surf pioneers, filmed in washout that matched the vintage ’60s clips of the surf world. Someone in the audience called it “Zen,” and it was.