Netflix Recommends... About Time (2013)

* * *
Director: Richard Curtis
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, Billy Nighy

I seem to be one of the few people who is utterly ambivalent about Richard Curtis' Love Actually, a film which has inspired love and hate in equal measure depending on who you're talking to, so when his time travel romantic comedy About Time came to theaters, I took a hard pass (though I might have given it a shot had it come out earlier in the year; as movie buffs know, there's just too much to see in November and December of each year to not be a little selective). When it popped up in my Netflix recommendations, surrounded by a lot of films that I've already seen, I finally decided to give it a chance, and while I was perhaps just in the perfect mood for its inconsequential fluffiness, I found it to be rather winning. Objectively, it is definitely lacking in some respects as a narrative; subjectively, I found it delightful.

Review: Brooklyn (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: John Crowley
Starring: Saoirse Ronan

In less volatile times, a film like John Crowley's Brooklyn, adapted from the novel by Colm Toibin, might seem too gentle to be really important in the wider social context of our day-to-day lives. Right now, released in theaters at a time when politicians are competing with each other to see who can take the most vile and closed-minded position about people who didn't have the good fortune to be born in a place of democracy and/or opportunity, it's a film that touches a nerve and is a reminder that the vast majority of those people who have in the past and are right now undertaking the long journey away from everything that they have ever known and starting over in some place where everything is entirely foreign to them are doing so not to hurt anyone or destroy anything, but to try to have a better life. Brooklyn is, at its core, a love story, but it's also an immigrant story about the bravery it takes to pick up and move into the unknown half a world away, and the opportunities for kindness available to be taken by those who already happen to be there.

Review: Ex Machina (2015)

* * * 1/2
Director: Alex Garland
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac

Word of advice: if an eccentric (and possibly insane) billionaire invites you to spend a week at his isolated, Bond villain style lair, even under the guise of it being the prize in a contest, don't go. Just don't. Nothing good will happen there. Especially if there are robots involved. Someone is going to die, there's no way around it. Best case scenario, you spend a week on an estate so vast that it takes over two hours to travel the length of it by helicopter, yet feels as claustrophobic as a prison cell. It makes for a bad vacation - but a pretty solid science fiction psychological thriller in the hands of writer/director Alex Garland.