Weekly Round-Up (7/15/12 - 7/21/12)

Le Boucher (Claude Chabrol) **** - A repressed school teacher and a butcher meet in a wedding and form a friendship then a series of murder involving young women begin to occur in the sleepy small town they live in. It's a slow burn film which takes time to build but the story that unfolds before your eyes is so layered, complex and thrilling that it had completely won me over in the end. It's exquisite thriller/bizarre love story that is sure to invite repeat viewings and much discussions.

The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan) **** - I secretly wanted to hate this just to fight with Nolan's cultish fan boys but goshdarnit, I thought this was a terrific closer to Nolan's Batman trilogy. I didn't care for Batman Begins so much but I did love The Dark Knight. I rewatched that film the other night and I was reminded by how batshit (pun intended) intense the final 40 minutes of the film was. I thought, can this film top that? I believe it did (not by much but it did). Tom Hardy is quite good as Bane, one of the main villains (although nothing here can top Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning performance). The end game of this one is highly crazy inventive that will put you at the edge of your seats. I will not spoil it so much here but I will say that this is actually less of a superhero movie and it's more a big, intense ENSEMBLE action-driven crime drama (which just happens to have people in costumes in it).

Pierrot Le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard) ***1/2 - A man and a woman fall in love and run off to all sorts of misadventures as they are pursued by hoodlums. This is my third time watching this film in so many years. First two times, I didn't get it. The film is so dense with pop culture and literary references as well as philosophical and satirical edges, that it got me a hard time trying to decipher it. Third time, I saw it as a series of unrelated sketches and scenes and it totally worked. It's not my favorite of Godard's but the film is still quite exemplary. I saw it on Criterion Blu-ray (it's out of print and rare but somehow I stole it for $20) and Raoul Coutard's beautifully composed cinematography shines through.