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Starting from the premise that I really like Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, at the very least (500) Days of Summer would be a bit enjoyable. But I was surprised at Mark Webb‘s anti-love story that played with some of the conventions of romantic comedy along with some lovely cinematography and a great sense of a humour. The opening epigram made me laugh out loud, so I was sucked in before the film even started. The film is really about how it’s difficult to separate what we hope for in a relationship and the reality of what is happening. It’s fun with a bit of darkness and drama sprinkled through it.

While a film about a poet may not seem like a compelling subject, in the hands of writer/director Jane Campion, it works amazingly well in Bright Star. While everyone (or at least those of a more literary bent) knows about John Keats‘ poetry, I didn’t really know about Fanny Brawne and her relationship with Keats. The film is visual poetry and wisely avoids the process of writing poetry (and much of the poetry) to focus on the characters and the surroundings. Campion paces the film very deliberately with a lighter touch and avoids the cliches of the costume historical drama and the film is startlingly quiet and calm. I loved every frame of the film as it carefully moved through the romance between Keats and Brawne. At the centre of the film are three solid performances from Ben Whishaw as Keats, Abbie Cornish as Brawne, and Paul Schneider as Charles Armitage Brown.

While it’s not Almodovar’s best film, Broken Embraces is still a lot of fun. With Penelope Cruz sprinkled through the film, it’s melodramatic, bright, and fun at times and gorgeous to watch on a big screen. It’s like junk food for cinephiles who prefer the art house to the blockbuster. Almodovar brings his love of cinema together with his love a Penelope Cruz together in a film that felt a little bit long, but still was quite an enjoyable one.

Set just before the swinging sixties in London, Lone Scherfig‘s An Education is based on Lynn Barber‘s memoir and the combination of a Danish director and British story works very well with Carey Mulligan in the lead role with a fantastic performance. Scherfig also directed Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself which is one of my favourite recent films and in An Education she also creates interesting characters and drama all infused with a definite sense of time and place. It’s rare to see a well-crafted drama that focusses on female characters that doesn’t resort to stereotypes or predictable plotting.

Co-directed and co-written by Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson, The Invention of Lying is a cameo-packed satire about lying that really is an examination of the role of religion in how we construct meaning in our lives. It’s ambitious for a comedy and I admire the courage and conviction to tackle such a complex idea within the confines of a romantic comedy. While everything doesn’t work, the brilliance of the concept carried me through the weaker parts and it made me laugh and think about many things.

I was lucky enough to catch Duncan Jones‘ Moon in the theatre last summer during the brief theatrical release that the film had. Knowing little about the film is a good way to see it as the thoughtful science fiction film tells the story of isolation and identity. The entire film relies upon Sam Rockwell‘s complex and subtle performance as the only person on the Moon who desperately wants to go home. Filled with allusions to other philosophical science fiction films from the 60s and 70s, it is able to make some profound statements about what it means to be human and how we make sense of our world.

In Pontypool Bruce McDonald crafts an innovative low-budget psychological thriller based on a novel by Tony Burgess set in a talk radio station as a virus spread through language infects a small town in Ontario. Confined to the radio station and a handful of characters, it gradually builds upon a simple concept as the characters try to understand what is happening outside where they can’t see. It brilliantly constructs the reality within the limited confines of the radio station in a clever variation of the zombie horror genre with a Canadian twist.

Joel and Ethan Coen recapture a bit of that Barton Fink feeling in A Serious Man, which is the oddly unsettling story of a professor at a midwestern university in 1967 who can’t make sense of his life. Wonderfully shot by Roger Deakins, the film combines Judaism with suburban angst, mathematics and Jefferson Airplane to tell another uniquely Coenesque darkly comic story. As the film ended I wanted to watch it again from the beginning to enter into the confounding world that was constructed and explored.

Kioshi Kurosawa has a unique filmmaking style where he begins working in one genre and then cleverly subverts expectations and he slips out of his previously mainly horror-related films with the subtle and beautiful Tokyo Sonata. The film is about a family and the secrets that they keep from each other. Kurosawa gives us glimpses into the lives of all of the characters as they live in the same house and don’t realize that they each are living in their own world. The film builds to a conclusion that is surprising and inevitable and I loved watching the story unfold as the characters struggled to find who they are and how they connect with each other.