Friday's Top 5... Movies Set in New Orleans

#5: The Cincinnati Kid
A Depression era poker drama starring Steven McQueen, and a transitional film in the career of director Norman Jewison, who helmed several light comedies prior to this one and then afterwards made such classics as The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming and In the Heat of the Night.

Review: Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: David O. Russell
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro

Hollywood doesn't always have a great track record when it comes to depicting mental illness, often resorting to playing it as a "quirk" to be mined for comedy, or as something completely dark and debilitating, prime material for high drama. Rarely is mental illness depicted with any real degree of complexity and nuance - there's "crazy" and there's "movie crazy" and the latter tends to play better cinematically - and though Silver Linings Playbook is a comedy, it takes its subject matter very seriously. It offers a deft mix of comedy and drama, of plot-based and character-based story, and is highly entertaining.

Review: The Sessions (2012)

* * 1/2
Director: Ben Lewin
Starring: John Hawkes, Helen Hunt

No one film can have universal appeal, so it's only natural that every once in a while there will be a film that seemingly everyone else loves but that does nothing for you. For me, that film is The Sessions, a well-meaning and well acted film that just ended up falling flat for me. While the film certainly has many excellent qualities, I didn't feel that they quite held together - or, to be more specific, that the fine first two acts were completely let down by the third.

Library Project: November 17 - 24

It was a Maltese Falcon kind of week as I continued my way through my DVD collection. Here's what I watched:

November 19: Lawrence of Arabia (1962) - the epic to end all epics. Even on the small screen, David Lean's biopic of T.E. Lawrence is majestic in scope and execution and Peter O'Toole has never been better than he is here as the film's complicated, contradictory hero.

Friday's Top 5... Unfilmable Books

#5: One Hundred Years of Solitude
The sheer scope of this one would make it nearly impossible to adapt to the screen - or, at the very least, to adapt well. Following seven generations of one family, the story is rooted in the complex history of its many characters, which means you couldn't easily remove any of them and still have a story that makes sense and has an emotional impact.