Let's start with two foreign films:
I've Loved You So Long
(FRANCE)
This film is dominated by an award-worthy performance by Kristin Scott-Thomas as a just-released convicted murderer who goes to live with her estranged younger sister and her multi-cultural family: sis and her husband adopted two Vietnamese girls--I don't know why I note that fact, except that the two girls are quite annoying. [The title, apparently, comes from a French lullaby.] Scott-Thomas completely drains herself of all charm, beauty and emotion to inhabit this role -- quite fearless for an actress who (in my eyes) always appears charming and beautiful, if a bit cool emotionally. See The English Patient. But it is not a scenery-chewing role. You have to wait until the end for a big emotional outburst; in the meantime, the characters and the lives they inhabit are so real that you come to care about what happens to them.Just as good as Scott-Thomas is Elsa Zylberstein as younger sis Lea. She brings just barely to the surface all the conflicting feelings of a sibling who is both trying hard to reconnect with a sister she still looks up to, while still harboring resentment for her abandonment. Other actresses would try to out-act her co-star; Elsa reveals her character in the small moments that make it all the more powerful.
Let the Right One In
(SWEDEN)
Sounds rather bleak, doesn't it? Still, I walked out afterwards both impressed by the filmmaker's technique and moved by the story. Except for a couple of cheap special effects, the scenes are artfully filmed (if you aren't turned off by throat-slitting, decapitation, and a pack of angry cats!) I was very pleased with the performance of the cats in this film: most of these movies use pets only as quick snacks for a thirsty vampire. Here, the cats -- with the aid of some discreet animation -- are the aggressors against the undead. They mean business, too!
The story involves a lonely boy with divorced parents who is the victim of bullying at school. He forms a friendship with the at-first reluctant neighbor who is a loner like him, but unlike him, she can take care of herself and instills in him the courage to do the same. They form a trusting and accepting friendship that leads to an inevitable conclusion. As a side story, the sad sack adults who unwittingly get caught up in all of this violence do not fare well at all: one-by-one they get murdered or bitten, yet they show a strange reluctance to seek the aid of the Police! Unwitting and witless, perhaps, but you still feel sorry for them.
Next up:
Changeling (Dir: Clint Eastwood)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Dir: Mike Leigh)