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What a strong debut! Jonas Trueba shows great confidence in handling that tenuous place in loving someone else from a place of ego without making our hero Ramiro (Oriol Vila) obnoxious or completely pathetic. The acting is great all around. There's a nice influence of Francois Truffaut going on with a few, sparse but insightful moments via voice over and an active camera that moves to the great jazzy score by Perico Sambeat. It builds toward a wonderful open- ended finale, following a heartbreaking monologue by Ramiro to his unreachable(?) love Andrea (Bárbara Lennie), which melds nicely with Sambeat's pièce de résistance: a chaotic yet moving instrumental. One of the best endings I've seen in a long time. It also recalls (500) Days of Summer without jumping back and forth through time. There are also jabs at other kinds of relationships -- from the purely superficial to the naive to apathetic-- and, bonus, lots of great jokes about the book store world where Ramiro works. This is a rich, well-drawn out film that hardly ever slacks, as it never compromises what a complex, inner problem it's trying to express. You should come in ready to tune into that wavelength and have some experience behind you to get these moments. Maybe I'm seeing at the right time.

I don't get the ratings here. This is a cut and dry poorly made movie and fans of the DC universe deserve better. I don't normally post my reviews here. But I have to share my take on this movie because it just wasn't good. I didn't even have to go into spoilers to show how terrible it is. Movie goers shouldn't mindlessly consume these films. Christopher Nolan set a high bar, but producers and studios need to step messing with auteurs and maybe we can get a quality DC movie:

There is nothing in Suicide Squad that shows any hope that an auteur filmmaker can do anything distinctive with the current cash cow of the Hollywood machine: the super hero movie. What Christopher Nolan once made his own has devolved into a predictable pastiche whose charms should be wearing thin on audiences. It doesn't help that the movie is also an example of how bad one of these films can be when it becomes watered down and designed to refrain from shaking up anything in the so-called DC Universe. Suicide Squad, a PG-13 film, was supposed to be DC's entry to rival Marvel's R-rated Deadpool. Even though Deadpool had its own problems as a self-aware action movie, it still had focus and a bravado that is nowhere to be found in Suicide Squad.

Suicide Squad follows a group of villains with super powers released from prison as part of a government plan to protect the world from terrorists or whatever sign-of-the-times fear currently plaguing society (Zika?). Starring Will Smith as the hit man Deadshot and Margot Robbie as the Joker's manic girlfriend Harley Quinn, alongside several other less familiar DC baddies, these guys are supposed to be complex people who have long fallen from grace and are supposed to rise above to find their humanity and gain the audience's sympathy. But writer-director David Ayer tries so hard to take a safe route, you can see the gears trying to manipulate audience emotion, revealing the inherit problems of these comic book adaptations straining to catch up with decades of printed storytelling.

You can't totally blame Ayer, who last gave moviegoers Fury, an incredibly strong and startling war movie featuring a better fleshed out motley crew of characters. The preciousness Hollywood has for its ongoing world building of interconnected comic book films creates such tight restrictions on storytelling that anything that might upset that world has no room to prosper. At one point, toward the end of Suicide Squad, one character asks another, "Shouldn't you be dead?" Of course not, this is the DC universe, and it's gotta be milked. That means no major players should be written off in one movie.

The result of these storytelling restraints is a soulless kind of filmmaking hampered by pussyfooting. It's like a syrupy glaze that drowns out any possibility to shine above what has become a predictable pattern of storytelling. Characters dole out uninspired lines that play superficially to feelings, like, "Dad, I know you do bad things, but I still love you." Then there are the clichés, like "fight fire with fire." Sometimes the script inadvertently deflates the tension by spelling things out. Someone over a radio says, "Use extreme caution," and someone in the action responds, "I don't like this." But in case you miss that, someone else says, "I don't like it either." A kid playing with his action figures can come up with better chatter to establish tension....

I've heard mixed things about 'American Sniper' directed by manly man director/actor Clint Eastwood, and I never cared much for Bradley Cooper in his first role that got him an Oscar nom (the overrated 'Silver Linings Playbook'), but for this third Oscar nomination, I finally think Cooper has elevated his craft to a genuinely amazing place. He gives real-life Iraq war veteran Chris Kyle wonderful charisma, yet he keeps the portrayal grounded, making for a charming every man.

Narratively, I think Eastwood does a wonderful job of deconstructing a myth about this fellow, who came to be known as the deadliest U.S. sniper in Iraq. The film's pacing is intense, and (after seeing Fury) it cemented for me that war movies are my horror movies (and I saw this film at home via a screener during voting for the Florida Film Critics Circle).

American Sniper just rattled me, and many of the performances are suitably intense, from the villainous bully intimidating the locals called "the Butcher" to an especially heartbreaking Sienna Miller as the wife waiting for Kyle back home. I know Eastwood's a big director with a reputation, but I really connected with this film, and I think it's worth catching at the multiplex.

For those who enjoy the experience of visiting art museums, National Gallery' is a must-see. The brilliant objectivist documentarian Frederick Wiseman captures the iconic British museum from every side imaginable. Over the course of three hours, he offers a grand glimpse of the museum's collection and temporary exhibits as others look or discuss them, from art historians to tour guides. Fixed history and interpretation are celebrated in both Wiseman's camera and the loosely strung scenes of people in the exhibition halls. The movie cuts to various perspectives of the museum, from details of paintings to entire galleries, as people gaze at works. But Wiseman also captures the people operating the museums during PR and budget meetings and, most intriguingly, at work restoring paintings. No one looks at the camera to explain their work and Wiseman never even uses superimposed title cards, yet you will come away enlightened.

This movie felt larger than the funny notion of putting a pregnant couple into a road movie searching for the place to raise their family by visiting their dysfunctional relatives and friends across North America. It shows how we live in our own realities and dreams and how uncertainly they fit into the world. The best anyone can do to cope is by finding the true self, in the Jungian sense. The greatest home one can find is within the partner one chooses to share a home with. The final scene is transcendent in the way it captures these characters taking their realities into a dream, as a family unit. It felt surreal and powerful and much more than some witty road movie.

An exercise in desolation that puts you in the uncomfortable philosophical and psychological position to consider the question "What would you do?" On what appears to be a dying planet Earth, God has seemingly abandoned man both spiritually and physically. Nothing can grow or thrive on the planet. All the vegetation has somehow ceased to grow and the animals have all died off, leaving the few human survivors to cannibalize their fellow man or scavenge for any edible scraps left from the previous society. As a father and son (played with melancholy desperation by Viggo Mortenson and Kodi Smit-McPhee) search for some hope at the coast, one cannot help but wonder what lies at the core of human nature: good or evil. Probably the most hopeless movie ever made.

I haven't seen a romance this touching since I was the same type of single sad sack as depicted by the hero of (500) Days of Summer.

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has his radar up for "the girl of his dreams" when he meets Summer (Zooey Deschanel). Too bad for Tom Summer is stuck on friends-with-benefits mode. Let the tension begin.

Director Marc Webb captures the feeling of innocent, naïve love expertly. Anyone who has taken the lyrics of the Smiths too closely to heart, would be moved by the idea of the person they are crushing on sing to them: "To die by your side/is such a heavenly way to die." No wonder Tom soon falls head over heels for this girl.

As events unfold out of sequence, you know all along Tom has fallen for a time bomb of a woman, and he can't even see the countdown. When that bomb finally blows up in his face, it unfolds with powerful simplicity-- no exposition or dialog, just two juxtaposed events that capture the heartache of reality hitting a person who sees a person through the filter of deep-seated emotions that were planted at too young an age.

So many romantic films nowadays concern themselves with cute ideas; take 'He's Just Not That Into You' or 'Serendipity' for example. Even movies like 'Knocked Up' where a pot-smoking, video-gaming, narcissistic slob tries to turn his life around to try to be a father feels more contrived than real. These movies forget about human feelings.

Who cares about stock or cartoonish characters in love. The couple in (500) Days of Summer have true chemistry. There are some beautiful, subtle moments of tenderness as well as some heart- rending moments of disconnectedness between the two that never comes across as heavy-handed. The movie constantly reminds you that these are two different people with different ideas of a relationship, yet they stubbornly continue dating, and they remain lovable all the same.

An omniscient narrator sets the film up early on by noting "this is not a love story." And, in a way, it isn't. It's a story about feelings. It just so happens (500) Days of Summer captures the sensation of falling in love better than most movies.

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It's rare that I am moved by a movie as heavily as Kikujiro moved me when I saw it at the Miami Film Festival (twice, and it was even more powerful the second time). I saw it at a press screening and I was charmed-- bewitched by the magic of Takeshi Kitano. He is a marvelous talent in movie making. It's so important that he edits his movies so expertly. He knows how to let the camera linger. His characters say so much without uttering a word. The movie is divided into nine chapters from the child's summer journal. At first I thought the eighth chapter went on too long, but upon my second viewing I saw the poetry of this movie. Just like poems use repetition to drive home a point, so does this movie. Kitano paints in broad strokes, he doesn't let you miss a single thing. Where an American filmmaker would get annoying in his repetition, Kitano creates a beautiful song. The music of the soundtrack is perfectly woven into the visual refrains. This is a movie of meditation, of reflection. It's more than a night at the cinema. You go to a movie like this to be rejuvinated. It's the kind of movie that can quench your thirst and curb your hunger.