FILMS IN RED were seen at the AFI Film Festival
FILMS IN BLACK  were seen at the Palm Springs International Film Festival or the Academy
FILMS IN GREEN were seen at the City of Lights/City of Angels French film festival.
Turns out I've seen 16 of the 270 films announced so far.

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All films are rated on a scale of **** (A+), *** 3/4 (A), *** 1/2 (A-), *** 1/4 (B+), *** (B), ** 3/4 (B-), ** 1/2 (C+), ** 1/4 ( C), ** (C-) , * 3/4 (D+), * 1/2 (D), * 1/4 (D-), * (F)

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38 WITNESSES  (d. Lucas Belvaux)
I think Belvaux is my favorite living director.  Certainly he makes subtle films that challenge the mind.  This film is another French film based on an American event transported across the pond (and like 17 Girls, it takes place in a seaside milieu, in this case the port of Le Havre.)  Belvaux based this story on a non-fiction book about the infamous Kitty Genovese syndrome: where a woman was murdered in Queens in the 1960's and none of the witnesses acted in her defense.  Yvan Attal is remarkable in the lead role, a performance of stoic inner torment which is all the greater for its subtlety.  But what is really remarkable is Belvaux's mastery of sound and space, where the port and city of Le Havre take on a sinister menace, and the audience is made a participant in the culpability of the characters.  This is a difficult film to watch, one which gathers in strength as it lays out its thesis.  The only reservation I have is that the film's psychological reality, while reasonable in a fiction film, is suspect when transferred to modern life as I believe it really is.  Thus, *** 1/2 instead of a higher grade.

ALOIS NEBEL  (d. Tomas Lunak,  Czech Republic)
This is an animation film for grown-ups:  a story about a railroad worker named Alois Nebel working at a mountainous border station during the 1989 transition period from Communism to free elections.  Nebel is a witness to the ramifications of certain horrors done in the previous transition:  June, 1945 when the Germans were evicted from Czechoslovakia by cattle car.  The story is a little hard to follow, jumping back and forth in time and highly politically charged.  However the high quality black and white rotoscoped animation (reminiscent of techniques used in Richard Linklater's Waking Life) is quite well done and artistically rendered.  However, I'm not sure why this wouldn't have worked just as well as a traditional live-action film.  ** 3/4

THE ART OF LOVE (d. Emmanuel Mouret)
I think of Emmanuel Mouret as the young, French version of one aspect of Woody Allen...a consummate auteur of well constructed, sophisticated comedies of manners.  Here Mouret is doing complicated farce in small connected vignettes.  Its major theme is how people can delude themselves in matters of love.  I can see a huge Molière influence here in the creation of certain characters (particularly François Cluzet's Achille) and how disparate threads of the farce are eventually brought together.  Mauret takes only a very minor acting role in the film; but as usual, it is his incredibly clever plotting which makes the film so easy to watch and so involving.  The only misstep is the throw-away story of a doomed musician (played by the wonderful Stanislas Merhar from Dry Cleaning) which opens the film and seems disconnected from the rest of the film.  Perhaps somebody more clever than I am can figure out how this story relates.  *** 1/4

BREATHING (ATMEN)  (d. Karl Markovics, Austria)
Roman is a basically a good, if troubled, boy who has been incarcerated in a borstal type facility, having been deserted by his teenage mother.  As the film begins he now is 18 and being day furloughed to apprentice work at a mortuary.  Thomas Schubert gives an excellent, if subdued performance as the boy, given little chance to succeed in life, but having enough pluck to root for.  The film is suspenseful and involving, and seems particularly truthful.  It's comparable to a similar Romanian film from last year, If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle, but more positive.  *** 1/2

COUSINHOOD (Primos)  (d. Daniel Sánchez Arévalo)
A young man gets dumped at the altar and, accompanied by two of his cousins, embarks on a road trip to the town he grew up with to try to connect with his first love.  This is a pretty much unfunny Spanish romantic comedy which left me cold. **

ELENA  (d. Andrey Zvyagintsev)
This third feature by the excellent Russian filmmaker of The Return examines contemporary Russia by telling the story of Elena, a working class woman who has married a wealthy older man.  Both she and her husband have problems with their respective children...he with his spoiled daughter, she with her wastrel son and his struggling family.  The film develops slowly, with long duration static shots reflecting the contrasting atmosphere of wealth and poverty in contemporary Russia.  This is a character study and social commentary mixed into a story that might have been a James M. Cain novel had he been Russian. ***

EXTRATERRESTRIAL (d. Nacho Vigalondo)
A couple on a one night stand wake up to discover that gigantic alien spaceships are hovering over their city (and apparently over the rest of the world).  This is the set-up for a somewhat incoherent and unlikely romantic comedy which is more farce than science fiction.  **

GUILTY (Présumé coupable)  (d. Vincent Garenq)
This film is based on a true story which happened in France in the early 2000's.  A middle-class, working, married couple with three kids are rousted in the middle of the night and arrested for child molestation and other crimes.  As played by the superb French actor Philippe Torreton, Alain is clearly innocent...but caught in a catch-22 nightmare of deceitful conspiracies and a self-righteous prosecutor/judge who ignores exculpatory evidence.  The cogs of French justice work excruciatingly slow, and Alain is degraded to the lowest tier of society as he spends years in prison, apparently "presumed guilty", even before any trial.  This was a famous scandal in France, an all encompassing failure of the judicial system.  And the director and lead actor
nail the feeling of personal powerlessness in the face of power run amok with kitchen-sink realism.  Viscerally affecting.  *** 1/2

THE MONK  (d. Dominik Moll)
Vincent Cassel is superb playing an ultra-religious zealot monk who grew up in a 17th century Spanish monastery, having been left as a foundling baby at the monastery's door.  He undergoes a crisis of faith (to understate it a bit) when he finds himself sexually attracted to a hideously burned, masked young novice.  Much drama and angst ensue.   This is a gothic period piece which wouldn't work without Cassel's mesmerizing performance.  ** 3/4

NORTH SEA TEXAS  (d. Bavo Defurne)
Pim is a quiet 15-year old boy with a flighty mother, who develops a crush on a neighborhood boy from a more normal family.  This is a poignant, involving film which gets adolescent gay issues right, with age-appropriate actors and a positive spin on unrequited love.    *** 1/4

OSLO, AUGUST 31  (d. Joachim Trier)
Trier made one of my favorite films of the 2000s, Reprise, and here he again uses the outstanding actor Anders Danielsen Lie to tell the surprisingly moving story of a depressive heroin addict on day leave from rehab, who wanders through his former haunts in Oslo searching for some reason to continue living.  Trier avoids the sophomore jinx and proves that the smart script of his first feature wasn't a fluke.  I was reminded of early Antonioni in the way the film observed its milieu from the point of view of its protagonist.  Also, Trier gave one of the best Q&As I've seen.  He's remarkably well spoken and astute.  *** 3/4

POLISSE  (d. Maïwenn)
Here is yet again a film by an actress turned director (definitely a trend in movies this year).  This is a slice of life, cinéma verité type of policier about a group of Parisian vice cops who perhaps fill the role of child protective services in the U.S.  In any case, they deal with perps and victims: child abusers and deserters, pederasts, child prostitutes etc.  The film concentrates on the stories of the various cops, many of whom have their own children and relationship problems which contrast with their jobs.  I was totally absorbed by the film, even if the dialog occasionally was so fast and furious that the sub-titles obviously weren't keeping up.  Only an unresolved, seemingly unmotivated ending prevented me from rating of the film higher.  However, it's the nature of this sort of film that real life just is not like a movie:  that narratives are not neat with beginning-middle-end.   That the film manages to project this successfully is definitely praiseworthy.  *** 1/4

RED ROAD  (2007, d. Andrea Arnold)
Moral ambiguity abounds in this well made, subtle thriller. *** 1/4

SIMON AND THE OAKS  (d. Lisa Ohlin)
This wonderfully executed family epic starts in 1939, when a dreamy young boy from rural Sweden starts school and meets a Jewish chum whose family has narrowly escaped from Nazi Germany.  It covers life of these two intertwined families for the next 13 years...years which gradually disclose secrets, underscore rifts, encapsulate the era.  This is great filmmaking, beautifully directed and acted (young Bill Skarsgaard carries on the family acting tradition admirably).  I was fascinated and moved...the film reminded my of one of my favorite films of the last decade, Mother of Mine, in its setting and mood.  But Simon is its own compelling story, and certainly one of the best films of the past few years.  *** 3/4

SUPERCLASICO  (d. Ole Christian Madsen,  Denmark)
Hoping to save his marriage, a Danish man and his teenage son travel from Denmark to Argentina.  Paprika Steen plays the errant wife, who has deserted her family to become involved with a dashing Argentine soccer star (who scores two goals in the eponymous "superclasico" soccer match).  What follows is a wry fish-out-of-water romantic satire, which works for a while but finally bogs down in protracted, unrealistic comic tropes.  Still, the acting is fine and Madsen is a skilled story teller.  I just don't respond all that well to his over-obvious satire. ** 3/4

TATSUMI  (d. Eric Khoo, Singapore)
Yoshiro Tatsumi is an elderly Japanese writer/artist who helped found the genre of adult themed manga (which he called "gekiga".)  This is a 2D animated film which utilizes Tatsumi's artwork to present his autobiography (adapted from the graphic novel "A Drifting Life") combined with animated vignettes from his stories over the years.  I had never heard of Tatsumi, nor ever seen any of his graphic novels; but his art is stunning in its simplicity of line and depth of feeling of his stories.  It took me a while to get used to the way the autobiography blended with the fiction; but once I grasped the structure I was impressed.  *** 1/4