Dogtooth

Forget about Inception. The most strikingly original film now showing at a theater near you (Cinema Village, if you live in NYC) is this Greek movie, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes this year. It is a cruel, yet morbidly entertaining little fable about mind control. I don't want to say much about the plot, so you will be as startled as I should have been had I not read all of Anthony Lane's review (still, had I not read the review at all, I wouldn't have known about this movie, but critics need to stop giving everything away).
Remember the Austrian creep in the news who kept his family in a dungeon? Well, it's  something like that, except luckily this is Greece, and the family lives in a sunny, Mediterranean house surrounded by a tall fence.  The tyrant who keeps them inside is not as crass as to be looking to just procreate with his own children. He is more concerned with keeping them pure and exercising absolute control over them. The fact that he looks like a third rate bureaucrat is one of the many smart touches of the film. His children, however, are positively Riefenstahlian.
One of the most astonishing aspects of this film is that it shows the enormous capabilities of human imagination, not when it comes to designing amusement parks or feel-good 3D movies, but when it comes to making up an entirely alternate reality, in this case lying, to keep people under control. First thing, and most important thing to change is language. Euphemism rules. There is no information about the outside world, and what there is, is distorted (to ghastly comic effect). There are treats if you behave, threats and violent punishment if you don't. The parallels with any paternalistic totalitarian regime (Nazism, North Korea, etc), are clear. But this movie goes beyond politics or ideology. What about the control men seek to exercise over women? For instance, it has been decided that only men have sexual urges (Newsflash: not true). Or parents over children, or basically one being wanting to totally control another, be it a nation, a child, a spouse, or a pet.
The filmmakers have imagined this alternate reality to an amazingly detailed, logically coherent extent. Everything is totally, horrifyingly plausible. With spurts of the darkest humor ever committed to film. There are no false steps (except perhaps one), there are no groaners. There are no movie cliché behaviors. The control of tone in this movie is almost as scary as the control it depicts. It is incredibly well written. There is zero exposition. The audience is thrown smack into the middle of the bizarreness and is immediately given clues to both dispel and enhance the bracing sense of  disorientation. The closest parallel I can find are the sadistic kicks of the Michael Haneke of Funny Games, except Dogtooth is much less histrionic and manipulative and not at all interested in berating its audience. Much, much better.  
Be warned that Dogtooth invests absolutely nothing in beliefs like the goodness of the human heart, or the human love of freedom. Au contraire, it places its hopes squarely on the most basic human urges, on human instincts that cannot (but not for lack of trying) be controlled, like sex. Or, at its most benevolent, the human hunger to hear alternate lies.
At one point, control is lost. Chaos appears gradually, in unexpected behaviors, which are not remotely heroic. The whole thing starts to unravel. But this is no Shawshank Redemption. If you are used to a steady diet of Pixarish pieties, this film will feel like someone cracked you upside the head with an iceberg. I love this feeling.

If you prefer a different kind of feeling, you can stay on for the showing of Mademoiselle Chambon, an achingly romantic French film, with the wonderful Vincent Lindon and Sandrine Kiberlain, which, almost the exact opposite of Dogtooth, is a story of human emotion in full bloom.
Makes for an excellent double feature, as long as you don't reverse the order.

I Am Love

I love Tilda Swinton, who with this movie becomes the actress who is best at having amazing scenes while sitting in the loo. She won an Oscar for her scene in the loo in Michael Clayton, and in this Italian movie she has another beautiful scene, as we say in Mexico, where the queen goes alone. She is gorgeous and elegant but not even her presence can save this movie from being an arty mess.
I love grand family melodramas, especially if they happen in Europe, where there is  old money, history and gravitas, and less vulgarity. And the plot of I Am Love is dreamy: a rich family, succession, rivalry between children, a torrid love affair. The problem is in the direction and the writing. The characters are half sketched, and too much style gets in the way. How many scenes of bees and flowers can one take? Or rain falling over sculptures signifying tragedy -- groaners all. Then some actors are amazing (Swinton, the woman who plays the head maid) and some are terrible. It's all very uneven. Even though director Luca Guadagnino is going for a style of yore (look at the opening titles), directors like Visconti knew that the more tragic the drama, the more straightforwardly it should be told, with bold gestures but easy on the style flourishes. And although there are a couple of lovely, moving moments in this film, too many are overwrought with an artsy touch, where perhaps just straight over the top would have been better. At times, the movie reminded me of that ridiculous, pretentious Louis Vuitton ad that always gets a healthy dose of Bronx cheers at downtown cinemas.
The film has a strange rhythm, it's edited weirdly and towards the end it really squanders our good will and patience, but there is something rich and half rewarding about the milieu, and the asphyxiating atmosphere of family power struggles and dirty old money.

Salt

So many questions to ask.
1. When the excellent cast (Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Elijofor, Daniel fucking Olbrychski, from all those great Wajda films) of this dreadful movie read the script, did they just skip to their speaking lines, or did they realize they were going to be in a Waring Blender for 2 hours?
2. Was there a story in there somewhere that was left in the cutting room floor, or was it always mindnumbing, badly staged chases and violence?
3. Who absconded with the story? And the sense of humor? A Russian spy?
4. When did Phillip Noyce become such a cynical hack?
5. Is there no shame left in Hollywood?
6. Why?

I understand that Miss Jolie has many mouths to feed. But she could earn her keep in movies that are not as morally and artistically bankrupt as this one. She has great presence. She is a good actress. She looks like a trillion bucks (although she must be famished). There is not enough Good Will Ambassador work for the Unicef in this universe to atone for this crap.

Mind you, I can enjoy an action movie here and there. Some are actually good. I'm thinking, for instance of John Woo's Face Off, which was oodles of fun and the action sequences were thrilling. There are other examples. But Salt is a ghastly affair.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

I loved the excellent documentary about her now showing at IFC.
She is hilarious. She is hilarious onstage, and she is also an amazing ad libber offstage.
Second, the movie is a bittersweet look into a life in showbiz.
Joan Rivers is relentless, insecure, angry, somehow endearing and extremely funny. Also, extremely raunchy and extremely politically incorrect. This movie made me realize that she is wasted at the red carpet. Her thing is stand up and if she comes to town, I'm buying tickets.

Splice

Bless the movies, where one can escape the agita of the world coming to an end for about two hours. What would I do without them?
I went to see Splice on the recommendation of critics that praised it for its intelligence.
I'm really starting to worry about them critics. Do they really watch so much crap that they lose their bearings? Splice is not a totally dumb movie, but I wouldn't say it is intelligent. It is basically an update of the Frankenstein story, which in its time was a retelling of the Golem story. That is, the power of human intelligence and science to create potential wonders but also potential evil. Man playing God. These fables have always been about human arrogance and they tap into our duality (good and evil, hopes and fears), which is why they keep coming back. Yet Splice is a strangely uneven movie that squanders many opportunities to be much smarter than it is. It is halfway there, sort of like the creatures that the scientist couple, Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley, create.
I really wanted to like it more than I did, but it is a better than average B movie. If it wasn't for the two heroic leads, who valiantly grapple with really cheesy dialogue, it would be laughable. And in fact, many in the audience were chuckling where I think they were not supposed to. But it's hard to tell, because the tone wavers between the solemn and the ridiculous. And though it does have some sly, gentle humor, it has big gaps in emotional coherence.
I liked that the creation of the creatures is dealt with in terms of parenting. The hybrid monster, created from human, animal and plant DNA, looks like a bald chicken, but Sarah Polley, who plays Elsa (as in Elsa Lanchester, Bride of Frankenstein), loves her like a mom. She also resents her like a mom, because the creature turns out to be a handful. Still, with a little love, Elsa is able to train her. Kind of. 
Frankenstein and the Golem were grown men when somebody first screamed "It's alive!". But this thing goes from conception, to mitosis, to embryo, to fetus, to baby. Splice is still about the danger of man (and now woman, yay!) playing God, but here the creation of the monster is at the biological level, not the industrial one, like in Frankenstein, or the metaphysical one in the Golem, so the implications are very resonant for our age of cloning and gene splicing and what not. It also makes explicit a fear that was not touched upon before, which is that what we create can reproduce. That if it is created in our image, then it is sexual. It makes one wonder, how could the older fables have left Woman out of the equation of creation? Splice redresses this enormous slight*. This is the smart part of the movie. The creature goes through a teenage stage; meaning, a truly monstrous stage of raging hormones and mutant feelings and to make things worse, she gets all sexually confused. Without giving much more away, I will pause here to say that Adrien Brody is a very, very, brave actor. The hunger and pain he probably went through surviving the Nazis in The Pianist is small potatoes compared to the one scene he is asked to perform here. I can imagine a montage of other actors rejecting this script on the basis of this one story turn, but Brody soldiers on and for that, I commend him. (I will never stop repeating Mr. Ex-Enchilada's dictum that he looks like a sad clown in a velvet painting. Yet I still like him).
Polley is even better, a wonderful, intelligent actress. She is totally committed to her bald chicken with tenderness and tough love and some darker stuff that the movie brings up but doesn't quite explore, so that some of her mood changes are hard to justify. Pity the actors who are not given coherent motivations for their characters' arcs, which swing as wildly as a ride in a rollercoaster without any emotional support. This is one of the things in the film that makes it veer towards the cheesy.
My biggest beef is that Splice is not scary enough. When I buy a ticket to a horror film, I want to be scared shitless. Otherwise, I want my money back. Splice has exactly one good suspenseful scene and a little bit of tension, but the pacing is as as awkward as the rest of the film.
But you know what is happening to me as I write? I'm mutating. We left the theater feeling disappointed by the film and now I'm remembering it with fondness.
So to sum up: smart in places, ridiculous in others, inexcusably awful dialogue, helped immensely by the presence of two fine actors, particularly Polley, starring a bald chicken, yet strangely compelling the day after.

*Even though the creator of Frankenstein was a woman.