Nocturna (2007)

Nocturna is a beautifully animated magical adventure. I enjoyed this a great deal. It's wonderfully imaginative and lovely to look at.

It's currently playing as part of an art-house animation series on the Criterion Channel.

Syndromes and a Century

Syndromes and a Century is a wonderful film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I love his work, and this is definitely a kind of bridge between the documentary-inspired work he was making in his earlier career and the later stuff like Cemetery of Splendour and Uncle Boonmee. This is really charming.

Red Road (2006)

Red Road is a solid psychological thriller. It's Andrea Arnold, so it's atmospheric and very well made, with intriguing lighting and photography throughout. I really loved the acting too. Kate Dickie and Tony Curran are both excellent, and a young Martin Compston is so great. The film wants - in addition to being a thriller - to be about forgiveness and letting go and other things, but I think Red Road succeeds much more on its generic terms than it does on its philosophical ones.

I watched this movie, like Coma and Water Lilies before it, because it was about to get removed from the Criterion Channel, but Andrea Arnold is an excellent filmmaker, and so watching this was a must.

The Wayward Cloud (2005)

The Wayward Cloud (天邊一朵雲) – the title is a sort of riff on "The Wayward Wind", a song you've probably heard Patsy Cline sing – is, perhaps, the weirdest Tsai Ming-liang movie I've seen. Lee Kang-sheng plays a porn actor who starts the film having sex with a woman and a watermelon. There is a water shortage in Taiwan, and so watermelons are everywhere – they're cheaper than water – and people are drinking watermelon juice instead of water. This also has very strange musical numbers; the ones in The Wayward Cloud are less integrated into the narrative than the ones in The Hole. These musical numbers are more interesting, though, and are very imaginatively staged. At one point, Lee wears a penis hat and dances around in a very large bathroom with dozens of girls. In another, he cross-dresses and sings amid many watermelon umbrellas. I don't know. I found this movie very strange, and the ending is very troubling.

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (2006)

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (黑眼圈) is a great Tsai Ming-liang movie, easily my favorite film of his. It's so tender and so compassionate, and it unfurls carefully and intelligently. I was particularly taken with the Malaysian actor Norman Atun, whom Tsai apparently discovered on the street before putting him in the movie. I loved this film. It's super weird, and super smart, and centrally – like all of Tsai's films – about loneliness and class inequality.

The poster makes I Don't Want to Sleep Alone look gayer than it is. It is gay, of course, but the man on the right (Atun) is helping the man on the left (Tsai's muse Lee Kang-sheng) – who has been very badly beaten – to urinate. It's not the sexiest of scenarios.

Sunshine

Danny Boyle obviously has a highly developed visual sense. Even in smaller-scale movies like Millions, his visuals are clear and arresting. Couple this superb visionary ability with great storytelling and you get the best action movie of the summer, which is easily Sunshine.

The film stars Michelle Yeoh, Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Troy Garity, Hiroyuki Sanada, Rose Byrne and Cliff Curtis. The performances are great, but what is really awesome about this movie is how it looks. It's a total nail-biting thriller, and I both held my breath and cried at least three times apiece during the movie. But it's just so stunning to look at!

Go. I'm going to go again. If you can see it at the Arclight, go see it at the Arclight. It's definitely this year's The Fountain.