Kubrick has, and always will be regarded as one of the greatest directors in cinematic history. From the tragic, resolute Paths of Glory to the sexy, involving Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick has always included one important theme into all his films. He always took protagonists, and created a sardonic anti-hero out of their modern, if at times caricatured personality. In Barry Lyndon, we have a poor farmboy who uncannily transcends into a royal position, facing love, grief, and loss, but Kubrick also made him human, an easily temptable, weak character when he was faced with love or power. A human flaw that can easily distinguish a fair amount of people. In A Clockwork Orange, Alex was an anomalous, at times sympathetical character, but also a pseudo-anarchist that never indulged in moralistic apathy. His flaw was that he longed for adventure, for exhilaration out of life, and when he couldn't get that, he turned to criminal behavior to relief his eccentric desires.

He was an expert in the field of human nature, in exploiting the weaknesses of his protagonists. Despite his characters sometimes being unlikable and wretched beings, they were always relatable in a sense, how we shared the same weaknesses, and made human choices, and held similar desires. Kubrick never created interesting characters without logical or humane reasoning, without realizing the plausibilities of his characters personalities, or understanding their living entity, placing them in society, understanding their intentions and vulnerabilities. He never fails to deliver three-dimensional characters, those who hold complex and simultaneously natural qualities, and through genuine emotion, relief, disposition, and revelation, he embeds a little bit of life into his films.

"Torture-porn" has obviously become common phrase between movie-goers. "The Saw Series", "Hostel", "Vacancy", and "Wolf Creek" for example. So along comes "The Strangers", just another unmemorable splatter-flick with few scares and little-to-no suspense, right? Well, hardly so, the entire movie was wholesomely entertaining, intense, chilling revel. By far the most daunting, suspenseful, and exuberant film I've seen this year.

The film begins with blatant tension between a young couple driving to their summer home in the middle of the night. We shortly come to realize that the man, James, has just proposed to his girlfriend, Kristen, but apparently she declined, claiming she wasn't ready yet. The first 15 minutes of the film center around their melting relationship as they try to put the night behind them and relieve the tautness emerging between them. When James leaves the house to take a breather and muse over what a failure the night has been, Kristen is terrorized by a masked man and in the house, which only begins the night of foreboding horror.

When James returns home, he discovers a trepidated Kristen in her bedroom, nearly delirious in terror, and the rest of the film beautifully maintains this atmosphere of dread, with three masked strangers taunting them throughout the house, with the couple desperately trying to reach for help and hide from the seemingly ubiquitous psychopaths. Bertino has successfully placed us in the position of a victim, hammering us as much as he does his prey, involving us with every single movement and sensation. He's a born director of angst and affliction.

Recently, there have been numerous horror films that rely mostly on violence and gore, and there've been just as many that rely on suspense, but the directors usually have no idea what they're doing with the latter, and they end up with a film that merely drags and drags and drags until it bleeds stumps. The Strangers is one of the few horror movies I've seen that uncannily mixes both thematics and perfectly constructs a film that isn't tedious nor agonzingly dull. It's always on its feet, never on lockstep motion, and when you catch a glimpse of threat that may break this chain, it's overcome by the director's limitless imagination in the genre.

The film holds the premise of a common slasher film, but it's actually quite terrifying, keenly-paced, and executed in such stark and winning manner (certainly helped by Liv Tyler's superb performance, capturing every essence of the word 'panic'), it's hardly comparable to the likes of awful "dead-teenager" movies.

8/10

Heavenly Creatures was one of Peter Jackson's earliest films, and is easily his very best.

The first half of the film is a rather oddly quick-paced and picaresque, yet captivating, haunting, and very enjoyable and frivolous film.

An apprehensive young girl (Yvonne, played by Melanie Lynskey) becomes good friends with more outlandish, edifying girl (Juliet, played by Kate Winslet), forming an eccentric and veiled sexually stirring relationship. Together, they keenly escape into an imperial fantasy world.

Juliet is an unpredictable, anomalous character, and that makes the film all the more alluring. After she becomes infected with tubercolosis in one lung, the now dependant Yvonne is put into despair and seclusion. After her recovery, Yvonne falls in love with a man, but when they are having sex for the first time, she can not stop thinking about Juliet, so she denies his love and walks out on him. After Yvonne and Juliet fully salvage their relationship once more, their parents begin to break them apart, fearing their friendship is detrimental to their health and too... friendly.

The two girls have fallen in love now, and created a world with an alternate reality, a world they play so vigorously, with endeavors so distorted and twisted, that they've begun to shift its essence onto the real world. Their psyche begins to lose prudence and moral, their obsession and desires for each-other surmount reality. The last 10 minutes of the film were some of the most taut, uneasy, and cynically malevolent pieces of cinema I've ever watched.

For how unconventionally constructed and colorful this film is, one can call it an over-the-top satire of acrimony towards homosexuals, and how unacceptable society has deemed them, how extensively they want to obstruct it. You can also call it a wild, more exaggerated rendition of Romeo and Juliet. Either way, this is an invigorating, wonderfully engaging, entertaining, tragic, and thought-provoking film which now proudly holds my #50 of all time position.

9.5/10

I understand why this film receives mixed critic reviews, and why no has actually bothered to see it. It's an uncompromising, audacious, complex film about paranoia, jealousy, and anarchy.

The film begins with a young, married woman (late 20s or so) getting ready to go home after a nice, long "sexual intercourse" with her lover. When she arrives home, everything almost immediately falls apart, beginning with her husband fervently questioning her where she was all day while his friends try to mend a broken TV. We can see the anguish and suspicion in his eyes, but he embraces her anyway, to show he still loves her and can't live without her. Afterwards, he orders her to take a shower, and as she's walking by the hallway to the bathroom, her husband attacks and kills one of his friends holding a bat, fearing he was about to hurt his wife. Hell breaks loose instantaneously, with everyone in the apartment building attacking and killing everyone they see. She tries to escape with one of her husbands' friends, but he eventually detaches himself from reality and his views become violent, twisted and disarrayed.

And all of a sudden, the film shifts genre, to the point of view of a different, but related character. This triggers a series of perplexing events, changing from an absurdist comedy to an effective, terrifying horror film, at times directly.

At this point, the film becomes an incisive exploration of both horror film clichés' and the human mind at its most vulnerable and delusional. It becomes a gripping roller-coaster ride of paranoia and deceit. All the while maintaining that raw, gritty feeling of 70s horror.

This is not a perfect film, at times the films' themes become muddled and at times unfairly ORGANIZED, and its ending was frustratingly incomprehensible, but for the most part it was an entertaining, thrilling, parallax fun.

8.5/10

It's difficult to review such an uncompromising, minimal, and merciless film such as 'Gerry'. The film is about two 20-something friends who go on a hiking trip, and eventually get lost in the desert, and we follow the two for over an hour, watching them sulk in desperation and self-pity at their hopeless situation. I was hypnotized throughout the entire movie, in awe of its rich, profound, dejective display of forlorn desolation. The tiny, rendezvous score beautifully fit the bleak setting in which such little took place, yet so much emotion flooded the screen, concealed inside the two lost men.

Gus Van Sant perfectly handles the camera with such ravishing long shots of beautiful desert landscape, and carefully manifests the true sublime presence of demise in the atmosphere.

9.5/10

The film "Once" is just your simplistic, but charismatic love-story, made unique and at times ravishing thanks to wonderful songs written by the lead character and the charming chemistry shared by the couple. Needless of a plot synopsis, the movie is about a man (mostly a failure) who meets a girl out of nowhere, and the film is a depiction of how they fall in love through the songs they write.

Unfortunately, the relationship seemed forced and constructed from the very second they meet. Everything appears to be pre-determined, and because of that, it didn't seem to naturally progress or flow. One 15-second argument seemed very out of place and put in there for the sake of showing us they aren't this "perfect" couple as we'd first assume. Without those songs, this would've been another banal, uninspired love story.

While this isn't a wholly successful film, several magnificent moments kept me engaged, and for that, I'd give it a mild recommendation.

7/10

This is one I've been aching to see since Ebert placed it on his top ten of the year list. The alleged true story of a small-time negro college debate-team that beats Harvard University in a Debate regarding whether violence is ever moral.

The performances from the cast are terrific, the work of Oscar-material. The dialogue and the actual debate sequences are tremendously written, but the film could not resist cliche, emotional manipulation throughout most of the movie. It carries the obvious black-people-don't-deserve-to-be-lynch ed message, along with the whole white-southerners-are-evil message. The movie offered nothing new to the subject of racism, despite being both involving and un-overtly-sentimental throughout said subject scenes, but hardly a breath of fresh air.

One of the younger characters of the film falls in love with a girl who seems to be twice his age, and the film deploys that sub-plot to the point of gagging. She's already in love with another man, who can't help but start a fight with her for no reason in particular, as if though merely for the sake of romantic conflict and Oscar-bait material.

To close, what the film delivered was an at-times touching and stirring, but mostly predictable and conventional, expertly crafted piece of 7.5/10.

So just about everyone in the 60s listened to and treasured Bob Dylan's music. The film "I'm Not There" is an assembling of all the contradictory and different pieces of Dylan's personality into 6 different characters, each as fascinating as the guy himself.

Unfortunately, not being a big Bob Dylan fan, I couldn't relate to his music or the surreal imagery montages of his lesser know songs that seemed to dominate 3/4th of the film. I found the scenes that take place in the lives of his 6 different characters captivating and at times innovative to the man himself. It was indeed a very well-edited and directed film, but too much of it was unengaging phantasmagoric beauty.

7/10