Mini-Review: Self-conscious attempt to remake a Jean-Paul Belmondo gangster film without Jean-Paul Belmondo. Although packed with style, through an inexplicable 80s filter, and featuring some tension-filled scenes, I found it overall to be hollow and exploitive. I hope that someday, as a culture, we can all look back on cheap, bloody, amoral storytelling like this and be embarrassed. Surely, Perlman and Brooks already are.

Mini-Review: Even more lush and mysterious than Tropical Malady and a lot more coherent than Blissfully Yours -- large swaths of which I found unwatchable -- Uncle Boonmee displays a confident young director approaching mastery. Every shot is so carefully composed and matched to the next that watching the film is like turning the pages of a handmade, artist's picture-book. Sure, some of the pages are missing and it's in a barely familiar (visual) language, but all that just deepens the engagement.

Mini-Review: Left me shaking after seeing it. This film is a shattering and physical rapprochement between the desire for vengeance and the need to forgive. That's probably why most American critics didn't understand it. A profoundly moral film, not least because it depicts morality as a constant struggle.