The Prestige
Not Christopher Nolan's first film with an M Night Shyamalanesque twist, but surely the most predicable, though we like Rick Jay a lot for a capitalist. Nicola Tessla so hot right now, probably because we are running out of power and still have to plug in you laptops.


The Science Of Sleep
Not the first French film about a relationship to over motivate formal devices, thus depriving them of any value as thought, but surely one with the most cardboard sets, though Charlotte Gainsbourg makes us want to smoke.


The Last 20 Minutes of Short Bus
Not the first film to rip off Ken Anger, Jack Smith, and Pasolini, but surely the most self congratulatory. It’s main fantasy isn’t about sex, but about the east village still mattering.

Summer Palace
Not the first movie by a Chinese director who tries to use politics to sublimate his desire for his actress, but surely the flimsiest. Marketed as the first cinematic representation of the events at the gate of heavenly peace, it in fact marks the final stage of the mainland’s adoption of bourgeois ideology.

the departed

The Departed isn’t Martin Scorsese’s first return to form, but it is his weakest. Nonetheless, we are reassured that Marty can still reach the level of Harold Becker’s City Hall (Columbia,1996).