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I think I can honestly say that I like Sam Mendes. His films seem to gun above all else for a place of timeless emotional resonance (even when that timelessness eludes the films themselves) and usually succeed, even within the more confined quarters of their respective settings, whether the war-gutted landscape of Jarhead or the 30s era noir of Road To Perdition. Although the critically loved American Beauty loses alarming shades of impact for me with each viewing due to its flawed philosophical stabs toward truth, Mendes still manages to provoke a contemplative mindset out of his audience. His films operate well on that level, even when they fall short in their personal declarations.

Away We Go is Mendes' warmest film to date, taking on a tone of humor and lightness that none of his other works approached without a biting irony to match. Bert (The Office's John Krasinsky) and Verona (SNL's Maya Rudolph) are a young couple expecting their first child. They occupy a ramshackle trailer in Colorado near where Bert's parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O' Hara) live. Bert and Verona's reasons to remain in the area fall apart quickly when his parents decide to immediately move to France for a couple years, despite hearing the news of their coming grandchild. With that incentive now gone, the couple embarks on a road trip around the continental U.S. to reunite with old friends and look for a new place to call home. With each stop, through each encounter with estranged family and past friends, they find unsurety in their future as well as deepening layers in their relationship.

I've read a couple accounts that criticize the clashes between the poignancy and humor in Away We Go, and to a certain extent I would have to agree. There is definitely a clumsily staggered rhythm at certain points in the story, but overall I'd say that the heart of the insights and conflict overcomes the erraticism of the pace. There is some great chemistry between Krasinsky and Rudolph, and the talent (the aforementioned Daniels and O' Hara, Jim Gaffigan, Allison Janney, Paul Schneider, and Maggie Gyllenhaal, among the rest of the supporting ensemble) create convincing foils and compliments to Bert and Verona's journey. The direction is solid, and the screenplay (by first time screenwriters, novelist husband-and-wife team Vandela Vida and Dave Eggers) is sharp, hilarious and mostly consistent with its narrative. There's really nothing to keep me from recommending Away We Go. It's got an infectious vibe to it, and while it may be incongruent at times, and perhaps ride the Juno/Little Miss Sunshine/Junebug wave a little hard, it still remains enjoyable and heartfelt.

I'm still trying to figure out, almost 24 hours after seeing it, if i liked The Science Of Sleep. Michel Gondry's a creative madman, that I can say with unhesitant conviction. His cinematic interpretations of dream and surreality are truly the stuff of... yeah. At any rate, this might have been his opportunity to really explore that world of subconscious experience unfiltered and in a way, I think he did. Just in a way I'm not convinced worked the way it was intended.

Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal from Amores Perros) moves to France from Mexico to live with his mother after his father dies. He is a naively earnest, self proclaimed inventor who creates absurd gadgets, the success of those devices almost purely dependant on the audience's interpretation. These creations are often inspired by the fact that he also lives in a perpetual waking dream it seems, having some mental abnormality that stunts his ability to distinguish waking perception from sleeping perception. His mom cons him into taking a job at a print shop where he expects to be able to channel his creative outbursts, only to find that he's stuck setting type in the company of a bigoted misogynistic supervisor, a couple of slow witted co-workers and an imposing boss. The real core of the story comes in the form of a young artist names Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg from My Wife Is An Actress) who moves in across the hall from his mother. They develop a cautious friendship that eventually breaks into a full on one-sided romance on the part of Stephane, resulting in his mad efforts to win her over.

The Science Of Sleep is Michel Gondry's first feature effort without Charlie Kaufman lurking somewhere in the background, and even though I want to think that that had something to do with my misgivings about the end result, I remember feeling similarly at the end of Human Nature. Gondry's nothing if not almost totally detached in his directorial style. It's definitely a strength in terms of his wonderfully imagined cinematic hallucinations, and it's why his music videos work so well. But with Gondry's films, it's the script that determines the resulting effectiveness. While he managed a beautiful marriage of the visually fantastical and emotional substance in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, it was Kaufman's script that reigned Gondry in. but since Gondry penned The Science Of Sleep himself, there was no counterbalance to his driven yet unfocused inventiveness. Michel Gondry's a genius, no question. But while there were aspects of The Science Of Sleep that I was absolutely taken by, the love story as a whole just did not engage with the weight that it needed but lacked.

Ending thought: it had more than enough heart behind it, but the story was too distorted by whimsy to be truly appreciated.

The Passenger has a deceptively complicated thread of an exterior story. jack nicholson plays David locke, a news reporter who travels to Africa to run a story on the rather volatile political climate in that area. at a local rundown hotel, he makes acquaintance with robertson, a British man claiming generic businessman status. after a couple hours of shop talk, they delve into ambiguous queries on the meaning of life, enjoying each other's company before retiring to their own rooms for the night. locke discovers robertson's body hours later, collapsed on the bed after a heart attack. after absorbing the man's death, locke calmly takes his possessions back to his own room and starts exchanging passports and clothing in an obvious play to switch their identities.

after those events set the rest of the story into motion, it turns out to be a quiet exploration of a man who's running away from life by assuming someone else's. i love antonioni, someone i consider one of the very epitomes of European film-making. his films are almost pure aesthetic, existing on an essence rather than narrative. there's very little dialogue and honestly, the movie doesn't really go anywhere in the conventional sense, even with the reveal that robertson was a businessman who happened to be a gun runner, which turned out to be a nothing subplot. the bulk of the story is two sided. 1. locke's relationship with a stranger, an unnamed girl who he glimpses in passing on a London square and later runs into in spain. 2. locke eluding his wife and television producer friend who are looking for robertson, under the impression that locke was the man who died in the dusty African hotel.

antonioni's films don't run, jog or walk. they plod. they are almost painfully deliberate in their storytelling from a narrative standpoint. but his films capitalize on what sets movies across from every other medium. they linger on expansive landscapes and locales. the camera drinks in lush ivy saturated cemeteries, stands and cringes in arid, wind whipped deserts, and fascinatedly explores architecturally elaborate manmade structures and buildings. everything seen on the screen is what an eye lingers on, scanning the visible plane, soaking in what there is to see. the environments are characters themselves, adding a visceral texture to the action of the people, enveloping them.

at the end of the film, you leave with the memory of a man, anonymous to everyone around him, a stranger being the only person he ever connects with. nicholson's acting is appropriately wooden yet sad. his eyes never lose that blank look of a lost man, and his actions are done out of a desperation to escape a life he never bothered to recognize. at the root of the film, it's existential pontification, and the subtext of it all is pretty powerful if you're willing to let it draw you in.