Mini-Review: When Tully first hit the scene with Cocaine Angel he was lumped in with the so-called "mumblecore" trend, it would seem solely because of his film's limited resources and nonprofessional cast. Even then it was obvious that his sensibility had little in common with Andrew Bujalkski, Joe Swanberg, or the Duplass brothers. Here even more clearly it becomes apparent that Tully has far less to do with 20-something angst than with the New Weird Americana of Harmony Korine or early David Gordon Green.

Mini-Review: Basically well-made but overly familiar (reminding me especially of the better Revanche). Petzold's style no longer seems particularly artistically "minimal" and more simply functionally austere, which is fine but works against the film feeling like anything exceptional.

Mini-Review: The parallels with Chris Marker's work are obvious here, but whereas Marker knows how to frame his philosophical meditations on the still image in highly poetic terms, Godard risks coming across like a pretentious windbag. The accusations toward Godard of "too much head not enough heart" usually don't gel with me except for extreme instances like this.

Mini-Review: Epic, exhilarating and perfectly suited to Assayas' global sensibility, acting almost as a culmination of the themes his films have dealt with over the last ten years. Because of it's historical and incident-driven nature, the film lacks some of the more overtly poetic flourishes of his other recent work, but on the other hand the constant procedural dialogue alleviates some of the problems Assayas tends to have sometimes with non-French dialogue.