A forgettable piffle, saved mainly by being a French piffle and the lovely Juliette Binoche. Saw it on the plane four days ago and have already forgotten what it was about.

Strangely unaffecting, in a Chekovian manner. Aristocrats stand around distraught, but we don’t care. About them, the Tolstoyan movement, or Tolstoy’s copyrights. The announced theme is Love, but there is no real chemistry between Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer; and the younger couple, James McEvoy and the luscious Kerry Condon, exhibit more lust, or puppy love, than any serious model. Paul Giamatti is either miscast or unnecessarily sleazy – what’s his game?, you wonder. An empire of sorts is collapsing, but we don’t care.

For Hollywood cornpone, this was done well and was a lot of fun (cf. Whip It). Sandra Bullock ate up the screen, but I was just as enamored of Tim McGraw as her easygoing husband and Collins and S.J., their two age-appropriate kids. By making Michael silent and rather opaque (cf. Precious), we could focus on Lee Ann, who was anything but. It is hard to dramatize the importance of an offensive left tackle in football, so those scenes were rather a stretch; but there was lot of truth to the recruiting sideshow, despite its exaggeration. This was much better than I expected, even after discounting it for its massive popularity.

Nigel Gilchrist, noted travel writer in dialogue at the SB Museum on Thursday, pointed out how important travel was to the understanding of art: one should experience of the theatricality of everyday life in Rome to appreciate the works of Caravaggio, Bernini, et al. The same can be said for the cinema, and our recent visits to Brazil and Argentina supplied the context for our enjoyment of this family dramedy from Argentina in which an uptight father can’t cope with the open sexuality of their beach vacation to Aguas Verdes. More than the story, this film was fun for the characters – the fat, bratty son, the sexually emerging daughter, the mysteriously romantic Lothario who broke the camel’s back and ended up in the drink.

More a promotion piece for the Islamic Museum of Qatar, this “documentary” had no modulation, no drama, no perspective and raised more questions than it answered about this project. For starters, how was I.M. Pei selected? Were there any concerns about entrusting this to an architect who would be 91 years old before it was finished? There were so many overheated shots of the same building that by the end I thought it blocky and boring. Worst was the voiceover narration, pitched at the sixth-grade level – maybe because the film is to be used by the Qatari government, presumably for non-native English speakers. [SBIFF]