Many dream movies fall prey to their own inconsistency, setting up an internal logic that they then violate either without knowing or without caring. Christopher Nolan's Inception, the most recent entry in the dream world sub-sub-genre, elevates such breaks in logic to a new art form, creating a visually striking tableau that is ultimately emotionally barren and intellectually dishonest.
Salt
Chris Knipp
You have great spy stories, like those of John Le Carré. You have great spy action adventures, like the Bourne stories. And then you have action movies with superficial espionage plots that are merely excuses for the stars to go through their paces, like Phillip Noyce's Salt, with a screenplay written by Kurt Wimmer and enjoyably bombastic music by James Newton Howard.
Army Of Shadows ultimately rises and falls on the strength of its screenplay, which, while not deep, is not as predictable as most Nazi films. While there is a sense of the ultimate doom for the characters, it's the how of their doom, not the why, that matters, and keeps the viewer watching. This fact lets the film find its own level as a good film, a very good film at its best, but nothing near a masterpiece.
Everlasting Moments is a richly layered film. At its core, it is one woman's personal triumph and independence through art. But her story is embedded in the gradually changing social, political, cultural and economical influences of a specific time and place, which happens to be Sweden in the early 20th century.
Flicks
Chris Dashiell
Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970).
Corey (Alain Delon), a thief just 
released from prison, encounters an escaped killer (Gian-Maria Volonté) by chance, and they team up with an alcoholic ex-cop (Yves Montand) to pull off a major jewel heist. Melville attempted a kind of abstract version of Rififi, but the protagonists are so indistinct in motive and character that the result is less interesting than his other crime pictures.
Le Plaisir (Max Ophüls, 1952).
Three stories on the theme of pleasure, adapted from Guy de Maupassant. The best is the second and longest of the tales, "Le Maison Tellier," about a group of prostitutes who take a day off in the country to attend the first communion of the brothel madam's niece. The director's gentle wit and gliding camera are in evidence.
The Far Country (Anthony Mann, 1954).
James Stewart and Walter Brennan travel 
to the Klondike to mine for gold, running into conflict with a crooked judge (John McIntire). Mann brings his fine sense of the open spaces to a story that becomes rather weak in the second half. The main attraction is Stewart, fascinating as a conflicted and selfish man that you can't help but like anyway.
High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963).
A businessman (Toshirô Mifune), on the verge of a major deal, must choose between dishonor and financial ruin when his chauffeur's son is mistakenly kidnapped by a criminal aiming at the rich man's child. It's one of Kurosawa's most experimental films; the first half a chamber play of isolation in the rich man's house, the second a manhunt through the underworld of Yokohama. The director's humanist vision illuminates the "heaven" of privilege and the "hell" of poverty and crime.
A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946).
A 
bomber pilot (David Niven) without a parachute must jump to his death, but he survives because of a mistake by the afterlife bureaucracy. He falls in love with an American (Kim Hunter) and finds himself on trial in heaven. A curious mixture of romance and whimsy that doesn't quite work—the premise ends up feeling trivial, and the plot gets sidetracked into a debate about Anglo-American relations. It does have energy, color, and the usual Powell-Pressburger wit.
