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For the 1st time in many years, I quit a movie before half time. It was/is "Coriolanus", yes like in Shakespeare’s. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1372686/ This movie deserves full stars for the way it deceives, starting on its trailer. As you can easily check, it is relatively well classified on IMDB (6.3 out of 10 as I write) [...]

Vuosaari (2012) / Naked Harbour http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787767/ Vuosaari is entertaining and manages to capture some of Finland’s social traces. It remembered me Robert Altman’s Shortcuts, but the shorts don’t necessarily flow to a common intersection. It is funny, it can be sexy and it is different, something ever more necessary to justify some couch potato time. [...]

I watched Eden Lake on 2009–06–18. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020530/ I was expecting an intense movie and indeed it was. Labelled as of the horror genre, it could be more precisely classified as a torture sick flic, with a twist. The twist is that the torturers are british children and the victims are a young couple, with a life [...]

Last weekend, I watched the Blu-Ray editions of Frozen River (2008) – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978759/ and Flight Plan (2005) – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408790/ I just love sad, white, cold environments, like those on Frozen River: a woman, living alone with her two sons, tries hard to put food on the table and ends up teaming with a Mohawk young mother, also [...]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497465/ I watched Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) [VCB] on 2009–02–23. Just superb, despite some technical failures on the early minutes: (1) the characters presentation dialogue, when the narrator refers to “Vicky only knowing what she doesn’t want”, when he should be referring to Cristina; and (2) some slightly out-of-focus frames, where the camera gets stuck [...]

I watched Paranoid Park (2007) on 2008–06–15. I was looking for a slow paced movie, and I got it, but it failed my expectations regarding its capability to drag me in, out of Lisbon/Portugal to Portland/Canada, for some 90 minutes . It was boring. Paranoid Park is a skate park, near Portland’s industrial district. The [...]

I watched Dan in real life (2007) on 2008–06–08. These days I tend to prefer movies where guns aren’t fired, where people talk without swearing every other minute (Californication), and where everyone isn’t a billionaire with a private jet… Simply put, it is easier to fictionalize starting from an extraordinary context, than to fictionalize with [...]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427470/ Interesting, different movie, about a man who has memory problems, after a terrible car accident. This man ends up involved in a plot to rob the local bank. The opening sequence, with night music and fireflies on stellar skies, sets the mood for something different, like a teen horror flick, but then the set [...]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407887/ Not as good as I expected. Bang bang overload, secret informers recycling, infiltrated people all over the place, intel powered by cell phone messaging, and a highly conservative – but effective – cast, at least for the three main roles: DiCaprio as Costigan – the cop who loses his previous identity, in order to [...]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433387/ The movie’s first minutes picture a military night operation, mostly seen from the night-vision goggles of American soldiers. The other battling side is Middle East insurgents. Jim Davis (Christian Bale) is one of the U.S. soldiers – he will find unemployment when back at home. Davis’ unemployment days are “harsh times”. Mike Alonzo (Freddy Rodríguez of [...]