Another weekend with something for every discerning cinephile:
- I liked the droll Swedish dramedy Force Majeure, which won an award at Cannes and is Sweden’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.
- The brilliant comedy about personal identity, Dear White People.
- The cinematically important and very funny Birdman; and
- The best Hollywood movie of 2014, the thriller Gone Girl, with a career-topping performance by Rosamund Pike.
- J.K. Simmons is brilliant in the intense indie drama Whiplash, a study of motivation and abuse, ambition and obsession.
- Bill Murray’s funny and not too sentimental St. Vincent.
- I liked the meditatively paced nature documentary Pelican Dreams.
- If you’re in the mood for a brutal, brutal World War II tank movie, there’s Fury.
My DVD/Stream of the Week is the John le Carré espionage thriller A Most Wanted Man, with its final, heartbreaking performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman. A Most Wanted Man is available on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Xbox Video.
Tonight Turner Classic Movies is airing Steven Spielberg’s brilliant debut feature Duel, a suspense thriller that is as entertaining now as in 1971. And on Sunday, TCM presents the film noir classic The Big Sleep, with Bogart and Bacall; The Wife and I just watched this again together a couple of weeks ago and were delighted.
