A searing portrait of contemporary Chinese society, not always comprehensible to a Westerner, although violence is a fairly universal language. The separate stories are marginally related, enough that you feel it is one society you are seeing; and the protagonists are similarly social misfits or outcasts, who all, in different ways, want a better life for themselves. You can calibrate the degree of justification behind the murders or suicide they commit, but more interesting, in a way, is the wall of mass conformity they each stand out from. Whether intentional or not, the indictment of China as a harsh and soulless place, not to mention corrupt and immoral, is devastating.

I could be wrong, but I found this Proustian: a famous writer who never produces a second book until, at last, he sees his aimless life as the subject. His madeleine? the naked breasts he is shown by a great beauty when he is 18. Maybe this is a stretch, but it fits the course of the movie, as Jep Gambardella goes from celebration to interview to private party to strip club to dinner to another party to an affair to a funeral to dinner party and on and on. The plot, certainly, is Proustian: there is no story arc, we just see a life in progress; characters come and go, while the narrator holds up his world for close inspection and general, if gentle, mockery. This is Italy, after all, and most particularly Rome. The Catholic church, modern art, the literary elite, sex, death, dining, tourism – all are viewed with a jaundiced eye. “My parties have the best ‘trains’ – they go nowhere.” The clothes are beautiful, the views of Rome are beautiful, the music is beautiful, the women are beautiful. We don’t have to decide if that is enough; we can just enjoy the view.

A very fun caper movie, with an all-star David Russell-led cast: Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence. The plot alternated moments of excruciating tension and hilarity, the latter mostly coming from Lawrence. Bale was unrecognizable as the guy from Out of the Furnace, and Adams conveyed a vivid intelligence and a spectrum of emotions while somehow managing to stay in her dress. Somehow – maybe because it was ultimately a comedy – the movie lacked the depth, the gravitas, to make it seem much more than fun – but hey, what’s wrong with that?

I caught up with two movies that had escaped me when I flew to and from New York after Thanksgiving. Both were fine airplane movies, largely because they had subjects of inherent interest to me: fracking and rock’n’roll. The former featured star turns by Matt Damon and Frances McDormand, excellent as always, and nice support from John Krasinski and Rosemarie Dewitt. The story, however, played like a first script by actor-writers, with a neat twist at the end that unfortunately didn’t jibe with everything that came before. That Damon and Krasinski were the writers and producers as well as stars of the film led me to think this little flaw had been glossed over. Unlike fracking, the film was cute but not very deep. Not Fade Away mined the New Jersey milieu of the Sopranos, with James Gandolfini in his familiar paterfamilias role. The story was well-worn, but no less enjoyable for that, of high school friends forming a rock band in the basement, then falling apart over girls, creative differences and, well, just growing up. In the end, this is just another high school story, but there’s something in every high school story that resonates, plus this had music selected and composed by Steven Van Zandt, so it all rang pretty true.