Year: 2001

State and Main, on the other hand, while the best movie about Hollywood since The Player, is a different kind of beast, one that doesn’t quite denigrate the Hollywood types so much as recognize that they are us, we are them, and we are all together. The quest for recognition and the need to tell stories are inherent attributes of our humanity, though they do get perverted sometimes, and not always in the places you’d expect.

Chocolat is an instant comfort movie. There isn’t a single event that transpires in the film that you cannot see coming from its opening moment, and yet it’s utterly appealing. And that appeal has a lot to do with how, well, comfortable a film this is. Director Lasse Halstrom doesn’t ask you to think too much about anything, but you can still feel sophisticated as well as warm and toasty, because the international cast and crew and Gallic setting will lull you into the sense that you’re consuming a Foreign Film.

Sneakers is just such a self-respecting techno-suspense flick, one that thought — rightly, at the time — it could get away with casting square Robert Redford as an ex radical hacker.

Donaldson and screenwriter David Self keep a tight focus on a few offices and conference rooms in the Kennedy White House and the Pentagon to relate the chilling and surprisingly suspenseful story of a few days in which war as it was previously known ceased to exist, replaced by a new kind of combat employing the weapons of international politics and diplomacy.

Tobacco farmers and liquor manufacturers get subsidies. Marijuana growers and cocaine smugglers get arrested. If the hypocrisy of the ‘war on drugs’ infuriates you, then you’ll end up with a feeling of smug satisfaction after Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s stark and unflinching depiction of both the naive cluelessness and outright pretense that characterizes drug warriors from local cops and the DEA right on up to federal judges and national politicians.

You Can Count on Me should never have been made, but thank the gods The Shooting Gallery — which also brings us its self-titled film series of way-below-the-radar indies — took a chance with it. We need more films like this one to remind us that movies aren’t always supposed to be about being big and bad and loud, but also about being fragile and quiet and observant of the tiny details and emotions that make up a human life.