Appaloosa **

Director: Ed Harris
Year: 2008
Book by: Robert B. Parker
Adapted by: Ed Harris, Robert Knott

Cinematographer: Dean Semler

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead ***

Director: Mike Hodges
Year: 2003
Writer: Trevor Preston

Cinematographer: Michael Garfath

Dogville *****

Writer/Director: Lars von Trier
Year: 2003

Cinematographer: Anthony Dod Mantle

Annie Hall *****

Director: Woody Allen
Year: 1977
Writers: Woody Allen, Marshall Brickman

Cinematographer: Gordon Willis

12 Angry Men *****

Director: Sidney Lumet
Year: 1957
Writers: Reginald Rose

Cinematographer: Boris Kaufman

Sin Nombre ****

(Without Name)

Writer/Director: Cary Fukunaga
Year: 2009

Cinematographer: Adriano Goldman

A difficult film to watch emotionally, but excellent. Very good direction and acting here, conveying the brutality of the Honduran MS-13 crime gang, and telling the story of one of their young members who attempts to escape from the gang by hitching one of the freight trains heading north to the Mexican/US border, where passengers hope to successfully cross into the USA to find a better life.

Unfortunately for this young boy, he knows that if he is able to get to the US, he will still lead his life in fear, hiding from the gangs branches in the US, especially the gangs incredible power and influence in Los Angeles.

The boy finds a friend in a young girl also on board the roof of the train. She hopes to make it to New Jersey to live with her father's American family.

The story is brutal, pulls no punches. It serves as a document to two separate but interconnected cultural phenomenons, the immigration trains and the MS-13 gang.

A must see film.

Cool Hand Luke ****

Director: Stuart Rosenberg

Year: 1967

Book by: Donn Pearce

Adapted by: Donn Pearce, Frank Pierson

Cinematographer: Conrad L. Hall

The Limits of Control *****

Writer/Director: Jim Jarmusch

Year: 2009

Cinematographer: Christopher Doyle

Editor: Jay Rabinowitz

I love this film, not only because it's one of my favorite directors working with my favorite cinematographer and editor and some of my absolute favorite actors (Isaach De Bankolé, Bill Murray, John Hurt, and Gael García Bernal) but because the cinematic poetry here is so mesmerizing. The themes and ideas regarding control, artist control especially, are meta. Jarmusch's characters speak of love for different art forms, just as Jarmusch practices an expert cinematic control in every dimension of filmmaking. De Bankolé's character exerts extreme zen self-control, just in order to kill Bill Murray's character, who is set up as the symbol of external control that hates the improvisation and disorganization of the arts. It really is a meditation on the different kinds of control and chaos, and the control artists must exert to protect their ability to be creative, unpredictable, even chaotic in their art. Art is neither total control nor total lack of control, there is control, and limits of that control.

This film is a masterpiece of poetic cinema, I love it.

An Inconvenient Truth **

Director: Davis Guggenheim

Year: 2006

Al Gore is not a good subject for a documentary... the strong point here is the information contained in his powerpoint... but it's a huge mistake for a documentarian to make a slick, self-glamorizing politician who is now making a living off of telling us about global warming... the black and white sap story about Gore replete with shots of him staring concernedly at his lap top does not constitute an interesting story, nor a riveting investigation into the facts of global warming... cut Al Gore out, ditch the power point, but do your own in-depth fact finding and interviews with credible sources (i.e. scientists, not politicians) and you'll have yourself a good documentary...

Unfortunately I think Davis Guggenheim is a lazy director, and just because he's helmed two big zeitgeist subjects for his two documentaries, does not mean he's done them adequate justice... so far very unimpressed with his abilities as a documentarian.