Check out Beth Hanna’s Blu-ray review of Criterion’s new high-definition digitally restored transfer of Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour at Thompson on Hollywood.

Check out Beth Hanna’s coverage of the 2012 Producers Guild Awards, where The Artist and Tin Tin were the big winners of the evening, at Thompson on Hollywood.

Check out the American Cinematheque’s Luis Buñuel retrospective  (mentioned here in the Los Angeles Times and here on LAist) running January 19 – 22 at the Aero and Egyptian theatres, programmed by Beth Hanna.

Check out Beth Hanna’s article on David Fincher’s serial killer trilogy – Se7en, Zodiac and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – at Thompson on Hollywood.

Read the Room Over the Garage essay on Se7en here.

1. Meek’s Cutoff (dir. Kelly Reichardt)

2. Sleeping Beauty (dir. Julia Leigh)

3. Into the Abyss (dir. Werner Herzog)

4. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)

5. Pina (dir. Wim Wenders)

6. The Tree of Life (dir. Terrence Malick)

7. The Future (dir. Miranda July)

8. A Dangerous Method (dir. David Cronenberg)

9. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (dir. Tomas Alfredson)

10. Marwencol (dir. Jeff Malmberg)

Honorable mentions: Shame (dir. Steve McQueen), Bridesmaids (dir. Paul Feig), Hugo (dir. Martin Scorsese), Snowtown (dir. Justin Kurzel), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (dir. David Fincher)

Check out Beth Hanna’s coverage of BAFTA Los Angeles’ Britannia Awards at Thompson on Hollywood.  Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Stiller, David Yates, John Lasseter and Warren Beatty were all honored with achievement awards.

Check out Beth Hanna’s coverage of the conversation with director Peter Bogdanovich and stars Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, Cloris Leachman and Eileen Brennan following the Academy’s Los Angeles premiere of the 40th anniversary digitally restored “Definitive Director’s Cut” of The Last Picture Show at Thompson on Hollywood.

Check out Beth Hanna’s coverage of the conversation with director Alexander Payne and stars George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Judy Greer, Matthew Lillard, Robert Forster, Beau Bridges and Nick Krause following Film Independent’s LACMA screening of The Descendants at Thompson on Hollywood.

The Dish & the Spoon (dir. Alison Bagnall, 2011)

Waiting for someone to arrive can be a profoundly sad experience. Perhaps this was on filmmaker Alison Bagnall’s mind when she made her lyrically thoughtful The Dish & the Spoon, a film about – among other things – two slightly off-kilter souls waiting for others to materialize. The greatly talented Greta Gerwig plays Rose, a young woman freshly stinging from the news of her husband’s infidelity (when we first see her she is wearing pajamas under a heavy coat, suggesting she tore from home without a second’s meditation) who travels to wintry seaside Delaware to hunt down the other woman. Rose spends a great deal of the film palpably angry, stalking and often screaming around the damp town of Dover, looking for a largely allusive offender who, to Rose, can’t appear quickly enough.

She acquires a sidekick early on, an unnamed British teenager (played with endearing sensitivity and self-possession by Olly Alexander), who spouts Herman Melville and mentions that he came to the United States to see a girl, waited for her at a designated location for six hours, only finally to be met by the girl and her ex-boyfriend. Rose too abandons the boy many times before the film concludes, and he waits for her with the forlorn patience of a young person in love, unsure of when or if she will come back. Bagnall’s use of stormy East Coast beachscapes, a summertime tourist magnet that has a swaddled, forgotten feeling in the winter months, sets a melancholy tone. Meanwhile the two leads roam about in the wind and rain, talking, playing, splitting and returning, united in their prolonged expectations.

Shame (dir. Steve McQueen, 2011)

Director Steve Mcqueen’s Shame is about addiction, but it is also carefully and implicitly about abuse. Brandon (a superb Michael Fassbender) leads a life of anxious, methodical secrecy. A quietly affable Wall Street type in public, he carries the private burden of a consuming sex addiction. Porn sites, prostitutes and one-night stands are all part of his hyper-regular routine, which he submits to with self-loathing functionality. Though we see Brandon engaging in a rabid tryst in an alleyway, and learn that his work computer is chock-full of smut, his primary place of addictive practice – his safe zone, in a way – is his apartment. Which is why he is thrown into crisis with the unannounced arrival of his younger sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan, never better), a beleaguered aspiring singer with scars on her inner arm and a haphazardly lax sense of personal space. We know from conversation that Brandon and Sissy are originally from Ireland, but we hear nothing of other family. That the siblings interact with each other in queasily varying states of undress, and that they both physically manifest unhealthy dependency, suggests that the topic of family holds unpleasant associations. As Sissy says at a critical moment, “We’re not bad people, we just come from a bad place.”

McQueen’s direction is elegiac. In certain scenes he holds on his subjects for minutes at a time, as if not wanting to let them go, while in other key sequences he has the camera swirl around and over them in a romantic panic. The instinctive, gutsy re-appropriation of the score from Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line adds a welcome sense of old-fashioned sadness. In Shame, McQueen presents an addiction that aches more than it titillates, is wistful more than it is lurid, is sweeping when others might make it cheap.