This showed real legs in its theatrical run – which usually means good word of mouth – and had Liam Neeson plus a Luc Besson screenplay with a cool premise: bad-ass guys abduct the daughter of a badder-ass guy.  But the first 20 minutes are a waste, with none of the family complications contributing one bit to the plot.  After that, though, hang onto your seat.  Improbabilities occur (of course) but Neeson plays the most ruthless protagonist I’ve seen in a long, long time. (The FF score would have been higher had I not been scrutinizing the early scene for clues to a later twist that never came.  Save 20 minutes of your life by starting the film when the daughter hits Paris.)

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As much as I like Clive Owen and Naomi Watts, they never gelled, and neither did this thriller.  On the surface it seems like an amazingly topical film about a sinister bank, but in the end the bank could be replaced by any rich cartel working a sinister arms deal.  Meh.  We’ve all learned in real life how banks and government working together can cause much more widespread harm than any arms deal.

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Mindless action from Luc Besson.  But I tend to like mindless action, and I enjoyed this.  The two pint-size principals in this buddy movie make for unlikely action heroes, but the parkour chases are amazing.

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An Argentinean scam.  It’s a bit predictable after seeing other scam films, especially when you hear about the inheritance.  Diverting.  You can’t FF these films much because you need to see how the trap is set.

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Based on a true story and worth seeing because the odds against these refugee Jews avoiding the Nazis and surviving in the Belorussian woods were staggering.  But they did.  It has a certain amount of grit and realism, even if Daniel Craig’s hair never grows or gets out of place.

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John Cusack (one of my picks to play Jack in the old days) and Morgan Freeman go head to head.  There’s some moral ambiguity and some good dialogue but a bit too much of the great outdoors for me.  Freeman is a cold-blooded assassin whose nice-guy turn at the end seems out of character, but it’s an engaging thriller.

FF=1 (during the long-shot treks through all that beooootiful scenery)

A psychological drama/mystery crossed with science fiction. I didn’t recognize Keira Knightley at first.  Pay attention or you’ll get confused – it’s worth the effort.

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Some will cry “Sacrilege!” but I watched the 1974 and the 2009 versions of this story back to back (almost) and found I like the 2009 version better.  I had fond memories of 1974, but a rewatch reveals a pretty flat procedural. 2009 isn’t great by any means, but I found it more engaging – I cared a little more about the characters and what was happening.  That said, I don’t see much purpose in remaking the film (or most other remakes, for that matter).

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I’m a sucker for paranoid/conspiracy thrillers. Theories about the ubiquity of the number 23 are not new.  I first came across the phenomenon when Robert Anton Wilson delved into it back in 1977 (the article is reprinted here: http://tinyurl.com/2m4xy5 and worth reading).  The first half of the film is slow but builds in creepiness as 23 keeps cropping up in the protagonist’s past and present life.  I thought it might take a supernatural turn (after all, 2 divided by 3 is 666…), but it didn’t.  Not a bad way to kill 96 minutes, but 23 wasn’t quite as integral to the plot as it seemed.

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It’s now a Mel Gibson film, but it originated as a BBC mini-series back in the mid-1980s.  Since I was housebound by the early February 2010 snowpocalypse, I watched all 6 hours back to back. A bit shopworn, and the end didn’t pay off for all the time invested, but it was a wonderful journey. Great acting and Joe Don Baker was super.

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