[MSPFF] Perfectly lovely Mexican portrait of a grandfather-father-and-son living off and learning about the sea – a gentle sea over a coral reef in the Gulf of Mexico. The ruggedly handsome looks of the father and the way they caught fish and lobster made the movie fun to watch. The characters’ hermetic existence – “At night, I drink coffee and watch the stars” – made it seem more fiction than documentary; and the film’s renunciation of drama and plot surprised the audience but, once we caught on, gradually won us over.

[MSPIFF] I have yet to see a film about Tibetan (or Mongolian) nomads that wasn’t overwhelmingly beautiful, and this was no exception. Unfortunately, there was no story or drama, except for two minutes when the yaks went missing. When committing to film a summer in the life of a nomad family, the documentary filmmakers need some luck to have something interesting happen. This time there wasn’t any.

Long on style, short on sense, these three made-for-TV crime dramas had a Twin Peaks flavor to them, with suspenseful music and an overriding sensation of never knowing exactly what was going on. Partly this was due to the Yorkshire accent, which begged for subtitling, but mostly it was due to the misdirection, which withheld key items of information and threw in red herrings instead. Who killed whom in the Karachi Club after Eddie Dunford took his revenge? Why? What happened to the shopping mall? What happened to the corrupt cops? To Helen Marshall? Why did she have a relationship with Rev. Laws? Why did Peter Hunter’s wife keep calling him? So many of the characters and situations seemed familiar from Prime Suspect and other shows of that ilk, most of which I preferred. It does seem that the scriptwriters in London have a pretty low opinion of what goes on out in the English boondocks. Red Riding (what does that mean?) did offer one novel twist: the three episodes had a common bad guy but a different hero, each of whom was suitably engaging.

No criticisms, but the movie seemed rather ho-hum and superficial in comparison with the book. It kept me engaged, but mostly to see how the next plot development would be handled – what would be skipped, what elided.

Extremely Hitchcockian music, by Alexandre Desplat, and the bleakly austere setting of “Martha’s Vineyard,” made one sense danger at every turn. Pierce Brosnan, Ewan MacGregor and especially Olivia Williams acted beautifully, and the pieces fit together like a Swiss watch. In short, this was a wonderfully made film. The only problem was the plot, which required one to accept that the CIA, without a recent success to its name, could engineer Britain’s entry into the Iraq War; and that the generally impotent (v. major powers) International Court of Justice could provoke a worldwide hue-and-cry over a Prime Minister’s “rendition” of four alleged terrorists, when the U.S. was doing worse on a weekly basis. Undoubtedly, this story would play better in Europe, where director Roman Polanski, for familiar reasons, is in exile.