Caper films are a dime a dozen.

Enter The Town.

Set in the Charlestown area of Boston, Mass. The Town follows around a group of career criminals as they struggle to make sense of the oh-so-difficult world around them. Raised to do crime, this group of confused young men know nothing else and when one of them, a woe-begone Doug MacRay played by Ben Affleck, tries to bow out of a life of hijinks things go wrong. Oh, and he falls in love with one of their kidnap victims, which is usually also a big no no.

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Black Swan is an exercise in imagination and patience; a lesson in ambition and jealousy.

First thing, don’t watch Black Swan if you’d like to feel good by the end. Watch Black Swan if you’re in the mood for a fair share of nightmares and a queasy kind of uneasy feeling at the end of the film. What I’m saying is that it’s a pretty hard pill to swallow.

Black Swan follows a young ballerina, played expertly by Natalie Portman, whose ambition is to be the lead dancer in her company’s adaptation of Swan Lake. That said, it isn’t a ballet movie. Black Swan is a kind of character study. Throughout the course of the film we follow around Portman’s character, almost in a kind of reality TV style, as her ambition drives her deeper and deeper into her role in the ballet, and as it drives her to become more and more mistrustful, jealous and, of course, stark-raving mad.

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I am a huge fan of Ethan and Joel Coen, you must understand. I also enjoy myself a good Western. So when I heard that the Coen brothers were working on a Western, I flipped.

When I first saw the trailers for True Grit, I had a pretty good idea about what I thought the film would be. I pictured something right smack in between No Country for Old Men and O Brother Where Art Thou. Somewhere between a gritty, thriller-drama in the desert and a bumbling odyssey adventure with upright pianos and barn burnings. This, I thought, would be cinema perfection.

True Grit, however, ended up being anything but perfection and despite the Oscar nod—despite the laudable performance by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld—I found it to be a pretty disappointing film.

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Catfish is the kind of movie that you can’t say a lot about without giving away some serious spoilers.

The film is a documentary, but unfolds like one of the best psychological thrillers this year. It follows a designer, Nev Schulman, and his relationship with a young artist, Abby, and her family. Nev’s brother Ariel and a mutual friend Henry follow Nev as his relationship with this young painter, her mother, and then her older sister develops and blossoms into something serious. As Nev and Abby’s sister Megan get more serious, things get a little strange and doubts begin to creep into the picture about the authenticity of Megan and, in turn, everything he’s been told by this family to date.

Throughout the course of the film we follow Nev, Ariel, and Henry in the most casual of ways. We’re sitting in the hotel room after a long day of work. We’re waking up in the morning. We’re following a GPS. The first-person perspective of the whole movie, the sense that we’re just another friend in the car along for the ride, goes a long way to make the whole thing feel more engaging and honest and emotional. It’s great, and the pay-off in the end of the film is pretty huge.

Catfish is a great film that’s really outside of the box. It’s refreshing, it’s interesting, and it’s definitely worth your time.

During the emotional roller coaster that was the Intervention marathon Maria and I watched last night someone slipped in a trailer for the new movie Devil, out in theatres in a couple of weeks. It was a short trailer, I wasn’t even really paying attention, but we did both pause and take note when the name “M. Night Shyamalan” whipped across the screen.

Shyamalan is one of my favourite writers/directors working today and so, since I follow him pretty closely, I was totally surprised to find that he had a new film coming out. Well, not exactly. As it turns out, Shyamalan was involved in the film only as far as the story concept goes. He came up with the idea, but that’s about it. Still, I like the way he thinks and all of his films in the past, as far as I’m concerned, have had really interesting stories at the heart of them so I’m excited for Devil. But let me tell you why I’m a bit frustrated too.

The concept behind devil—the concept that Shyamalan came up with—is that a bunch of people are stuck in an elevator on their way to work. One by one, they begin dying, and someone in that elevator is responsible for killing them, one of them is the devil himself.

It sounds like an interesting concept, but of course Shyamalan is going to get some flack. Sometimes I wonder if he isn’t the (amateur) movie critics whipping boy..

As soon as trailers for Devil trickled out of the production house the press dug up that same tired old line, “It might be a good movie, but I bet it has a twist ending.”

Ah, the good old twist ending. That style of film-making and story-telling that M. Night Shyamalan is infamous for. Well, the press say, he better work hard to dig himself out of that whole, he better finally make a movie without a twist ending.

And I roll my eyes clear out of my head.

Now I don’t want to confuse being a Shyamalan fan with being a fanboy, a fanatic, or an apologist. I am none of those things but I am tired of hearing the poor guy get flack for widely help misconceptions and poorly-researched assertions.

It is incorrect to say that all M. Night Shyamalan films have twist endings. It’s incorrect to say that he really needs to redeem himself from that plot device and come up with something new.

A quick look at his film-making resume from the past ten or so years is revealing:

- The Sixth Sense (Twist; he’s dead)
- Stuart Little (No Twist; we knew he was a mouse all along)
- Unbreakable (Small twist; you’re a superhero and he’s your nemesis)
- Signs (No Twist; we knew they were aliens)
- The Village (Twist; it’s the 21st century, better buy a new wardrobe)
- Lady in the Water (No Twist)
- The Happening (No Twist)
- The Last Airbender (No Twist)

Basing our conclusions on actual research (i.e., I looked at a list of films he’s made) it’s clear that less than half of his movies feature twist endings. But why does he still receive so much negative attention over it? Why does he have to redeem himself with a film like Devil?

As far as I’m concerned Shyamalan does a great twist ending, he’s a clever writer and director, but it isn’t the only thing he can do. He’s proven himself as a competent film-maker time and time again. While I didn’t see The Last Airbender (I think it’s a film for kids) both The Happening (an intentionally-crafted B-movie) and Lady in the Water (a fairytale) were pulled off very well. And no twists.

From what I’ve seen so far Devil looks like it’ll be a pretty good film. It’s a cool concept. But all the buzz on whether or not we’ll be in for a big twist in the end is just foolishness. Although for a film about the devil, wouldn’t it be perfectly fitting?

I had the opportunity to watch The Brothers Bloom this weekend. It’s a film that Maria and I had wanted to see for a long time but just hadn’t got around to it. To be honest, after our extended Oscar-nominated film-watching marathon we’ve both been a little burnt out on the cinema. However, if we’d realized how great The Brothers Bloom was going to be, we certainly wouldn’t have waited this long to watch it.

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My friend Sara posted this on my Facebook Wall in response to the video I linked to earlier.

Leave it to someone to find all of the answers to the questions we were left with after the LOST finale.

It’s as amusing as the original LOST questions video was. Pretty clever.