Julia (2008, France/USA/Mexico/Belgium)

I’ve seen Tilda Swinton in a good number of movies, but I’ve never seen her like she is in Julia. It’s a fantastic performance, even for Swinton, playing against type as a brash loose cannon of an alcoholic, a party girl who’s starting to unravel as she heads towards middle age. When an opportunity to do the wrong thing presents itself, Julia barely thinks twice before making a bad decision that, not unexpectedly, spirals out of control. Unfortunately, there are a few too many twists and turns, and Julia is at least a half an hour longer than it should be. It’s that much more time to spend with Swinton’s terrifying, fascinating character, but the film as a whole would have served her performance better were it just a little bit tighter.

(I’m not kidding about the terrifying, by the way. Julia is not for the squeamish. It’s a pretty relentlessly ugly film.)

Shall We Dance? (1995, Japan)

I have a hard time thinking of another film that’s as guileless and charming as Shall We Dance? Taking time off from some of his more intense work in the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shohei Imamura, Koji Yakusho plays a serious-minded salaryman who becomes entranced by ballroom dancing, a pastime he must hide from his family and co-workers, as dancing is seen as inappropriately intimate in Japanese society. Yakusho’s excellent performance is supported by a strong cast, in particular the bizarre Naoto Takenake as a Rumba-obsessed co-worker and Reiko Kusamura as their sweet middle-aged dance instructor. This was my second viewing of Dance, and it didn’t lose any of its appeal on repeat. Its pleasures are largely conventional, but they are so sincerely executed and professionally rendered that Dance reminded me why I go to the movies.

Watchmen (2009, USA)

Zack Snyder’s Watchmen looks gorgeous – you can see every penny of its enormous budget on the screen – but it has no soul. Snyder has taken a wonderfully dense narrative and found a way to make it both an anvil festival and a pointlessly opaque translation. It screams out some of its themes while discarding others with little more than a shrug. There’s a lot of speechifying with very little actual content – in fact, it’s kind of stunning that a film with this much going on is so stupefyingly boring. There’s no sense of impending doom, nuclear or otherwise.

Two more quick points: one – I hope the music supervisor never gets another job, ever. Two – I love how Snyder insisted on pummeling the audience with images of the Twin Towers, despite the fact that even in an alternate reality, they would most likely have been standing in 1985. Just another example of how Snyder always goes for the most obvious idea first, seeking to hide the fact that his movies are little but sound and fury.

Tokyo! (2008, France, Japan, Germany, South Korea)

For a movie with an exclamation mark in its title, Tokyo! is pretty dour. The anthology, featuring short works by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, and Bong Joon-Ho, focuses on lost souls in the Japanese megopolis. Is it because they’re foreigners that these takes on Tokyo are so dark? Or does the city just bring out the worst in too many?

The series kicks off with Gondry’s Interior Design, in which two young lovers try to make it in the big city, despite parking regulations, an ugly real estate market, and more than a little self-doubt. It’s somewhat whimsical, which is to be expected from Gondry, and touches on his usual themes of artistic viability and male-female disconnection. It’s a tight and somewhat affecting little tale, however, without Gondry’s more typical excesses. Unfortunately, the following piece by Carax doesn’t avoid the same. Too broad by half – an obvious allegory about the xenophobia and general unrest lurking just below Japan’s surface – it’s stylish, but ultimately frustrating and flat.

My favorite section is Bong Joon-Ho’s story of an agoraphobic Tokyoite who inadvertently finds the connection he needs. Still fairly obvious, thematically, it’s anchored by the awesome Teruyuki Kagawa (Tokyo Sonata, Sukiyaki Western Django), and has a humanity that the other films lack. Its take on Tokyo life may not be much sunnier than the preceding two, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to finally find a hero.

(For what it’s worth, expect to see a good deal of Japanese fare here in the next couple of months. (If I can get my act together and start posting regular reviews, that is.) I’m headed to Japan in November, and in anticipation, I plan to be queuing up a number of old favorites as well as some films I’ve been meaning to get around to for ages.)

Rachel Getting Married (2008, USA)

I haven’t been a fan of Jonathan Demme’s work over the last decade or so, but I was sucked in by the baldly emotional Rachel Getting Married. The cast is superb – I was particularly impressed by Bill Irwin, Rosemarie DeWitt and Tunde Adebimpe – and the story bounces back and forth between the happy moments leading up to a large family wedding, and the raw, more painful ones that well up from family history. It’s a tension between the immediate and the historical, an examination about how nothing is ever truly buried or forgotten, and how the best parts of life are often necessarily intertwined with the worst.

Inglorious Basterds (2009, USA/Germany)

Quentin Tarantino directs like a kid in a candy store. He’s the ultimate film nerd, and fifteen years after Pulp Fiction, it’s like he still can’t believe his luck. This exuberance has its benefits and its pitfalls. On one hand, few directors can match him for sheer energy and entertainment value. On the other, his films are often little more than individual scenes strung together, with little glue in between.

But wow – what scenes. Starting with the obvious – the opening marathon between Christoph Waltz’s SS Colonel Landa and a French dairy farmer played by Denis Menochet – and continuing through such meticulous gems as Landa’s initial meeting with the grown Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent), and the excruciatingly tense sequence in La Louisiana, Tarantino crams in so much detail and so many homages to his film heroes that it would likely take a dozen viewings to unpack them all.

And this is probably my favorite thing about Basterds - Tarantino is finally making some natural, if occasionally totally insane, statements about the power of film, something that he’s only played with stylistically with earlier works like Jackie Brown and Kill Bill. From the tongue-in-cheek references to Leni Riefenstahl and other German propaganda films, to the fact that (SPOILER!) film, physical film, is used to rewrite history and literally kill Hitler and his cronies, Tarantino has made a propaganda film of his own that is all about the power of the movies to color our perception of the world. The characters reference films constantly (one of my favorites is in the La Louisiana scene – “Am I the story of the Negro in America?” “No.” “Then I must be King Kong!”), and the movie itself employs the hallmarks of various genres, jumping back and forth between. This works sometimes – the Spaghetti Western and the war film are natural allies – but occasionally oversteps, as with the Blacksploitation introduction of Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger). It’s funny, but also more than a little distracting. But would it be a Tarantino film without the excess? Now at least he has a little sub- to go with his text.