Police Beat, Robinson Devor, 2005

Devor's is a sublime and somnambulent film, with Z, its lovesick, homesick protagonist, loping through a Seattle of dead birds, dead-eyed prostitues, and drowned hope.

Letters From Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood, 2006

Eastwood's foreign language epic is an ambitious and ultimately flawed effort, at once overly sentimental, deceptively Western, and stocked with characterizations all too familliar. Despite a well wrought first act, Iwo Jima is finally neither a triumph of the character of battle nor its tactical machinations, but rather an unsatisfying melange of the two.

Carlo Ponti (1912-2007)

Ett Hal i Mitt Hjarta (A Hole in My Heart), Lukas Moodysson, 2005.

Moodysson's art/shock sex film employs a bleak experimentalism not unlike that of Harmony Korine in an unsettling (if not wholly successful) examination of working class disaffection and degenerecy.

The Saddest Music in the World, Guy Maddin, 2004

Maddin's at once experimental and encyclopedic film plays as an American art film conceived in 1923 might, with the ghosts of Tod Browning, FW Murnau, and Busby Berkeley informing the proceedings.