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I saw "De La Calle" (aka, "Streeters) at the Chicago International Film Festival, where it had been touted as a remarkable film with chilling insights into the lives of street kids in Mexico City. It was an engaging enough film, with fairly sympathetic characters and reasonable excitement, but the director's inexperience showed. His plot sometimes dragged, his character were not fully developed, and most of all, he his metaphors hit the viewer over the head. Also, he often moved his camera inexplicably -- it's as if he wanted to make bold statements, as a good director would, but didn't understand how to make those statements. All told, it's an adequate movie, worth a few bucks, but not what it might have been.

I had never seen a Buster Keaton movie before this one; now, I only wish I hadn't missed so much of the local Keaton film fest. This film was unlike anything I'd ever seen before -- a jaw-dropping of hilarity and acrobatic skill. You want to sit there, stunned at the stunts Buster pulls, but it's so hilarious, you absolutely can't stop laughing. It's simply a good movie for about 45 minutes; then, the last 15 are incomparable.

This movie is the epitome of brilliantly dramatic character study: It's so phenomenal, watching it is excruciating. Cassavetes takes us deep inside the lives of a bored, shallow upper-middle-class couple, and as his skilled actors improvise remarkably realistic scenes, down to the smallest mannerism of their characters, Cassavetes forces us to watch every knife-twisting second. It's difficult: Rather than watching an unpleasant situation, then getting pulled away by an editor's cut, we have to sit through all 20 or 25 minutes of a scene that makes us squirm, whether it's a middle-aged man making an ass of himself to impress a young prostitute or his wife feigning laughter to make a young man think she's having fun with him. While not the best movie I've ever seen, it's unique: A great work to whose style nothing else compares.