The Squid and the Whale (2005) : review: 10/10

A New York couple, both writers and fundamentally selfish, divorce: they have two boys. The film is a blow by blow account of the separation, as the younger boy stays with his mother and the elder goes with his father.  The elder carries forward the resentment and hostility of the father, whose behaviour is often childish and hostile.

The boys evolving sexual attitudes are described as they each find love objects: the attiude of the elder coloured by resentments towards his mother. The father finds a much younger girlfriend, and the mother comences an affair with the family tennis coach: ergo, further complicatons.

Excellently acted, well paced, painful and credible, with a black comic edge that keeps it entertaining.

Me You and Everone We Know (2005): review: 10/10

A shoe-seller is separated: he has two children and they move into a suburb. The children communicate on the internet with strangers. The shoe-seller becomes the love-object of  curly headed, kind hearted, frumpy artist. The artist sends her work to a severe woman who runs a contemporary art gallery: she is most amusingly portrayed. The characters evolve and cross.

The film contains many splendidly directed vignettes, tightly observed and often hovering strangely on an edge between comedy and pathos. They effectively describe a sort of boredom,  like a sense of strained anticipation that is familiar in suburbs. The characters are viewed with both compassion and humour: they are very nearly treated sentimentally, but there is a sense in the film throughout of the potential for violence and cruelty in human relationships that lends each scene vitality.

A Village Affair (1995): review: 8/10

A depressed artist and her shallow lawyer husband move to a small village: there they make a aquaintance of a  sexually voracious brunette with very red lipstick, a spoiled young woman and the subject of  much gossip.

Well acted and sensitively made film about relationships and attitudes among the English country bourgesie, described through the prism of the artist's romantic crisis, which intelligently balances melodrama and seriousness.

The Amityville Horror (2005): review: 4/10

An attractive young couple find and purchase an substantial Victorian property for an unually low price, and move their with two children, a blonde boy and girl spawn of the female's previous dallaince. They also bring a dog, which happens to belong to the boy.

There follows a series of harrowing incidents, often involving taps, in which the boyfriend reveals intense dislike of his obese stepson and his dog. The mother, who has become quite anxious, attempts to seek the assistance of a priest, but he proves quite useless and the family reluctantly choose to abandon their dream home and sail off in a speedboat.

Factotum (2005): review- 9/10

Matt Dillon is magnificently world weary as the struggling writer, stumbling from job to job in St Paul, Minnesota.

This film is Norwegian and there is more than a little of Hamsun's "Hunger" in all this, though the film is based on Bukowski.

Very beautifully shot, with great music too.