Pictureland

Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly in Winter's Bone Ree Dolly walks her much younger brother and sister to school, quzzing the latter in spelling and arithmetic.  Ree should be on her way to school as well; she's only 17, after all.  But we see her drop her siblings off and then wander around the school, clearly an outsider, much as there are nods of recognition among she and some of the kids her age.  She watches students in a classroom handling lifelike infant dolls in some sort of family skills class, another motley group marching haphazardly down a hallway and into the gymnasium as part of a ROTC drill.   Ree observes these exercises, her contemporaries essentially playing at life, with a kind of disbelief, mouth slightly agape.   Being able to play at tending to children or even entering the military in reality are not luxuries she can afford.   ...

There comes a point in Get Him to the Greek at which Sean Combs begins to gleefully eat his head.  Is this perhaps a meditation on identity and celebrity?  Combs devouring P. Diddy, chomping Puff Daddy...conflating the many personas back to the very essence of the man?   Well, not so much.   The surreal, incestuous Pac-Man we see is actually part of an absinthe trip besetting poor Aaron Green (Jonah Hill), as he tries to ride the bucking (quaffing, snorting, sniffing) rock-n-roll bronco that is Aldous Snow, all the way from dear old Blighty to NYC and ultimately to an anniversary gig at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles.   Like many such episodes in Get Him to the Greek, the scene is smart, more than a little deranged and very funny.  But yay, though we now walk through the valley of the shadow of cinematic death which is these past couple of years, you should fear no such evil.   You should seek it out, in fact  Get Him ...

On screen and real life father and daughter, Louis-Do and Alice de Lencquesaing in The Father of My Children As The Father of My Children  begins, we see Gregoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) walking around Paris, wielding a couple of cell phones in a constant relay of  conversations.   He has the sleekly-dressed and slightly unctuous tone of a film producer.  Little wonder then that we find out he is indeed a producer, head of the struggling Moon Films.   A call about housing a Korean film crew gives way to an update from the set of  Swedish auteur Stig Janson (Magne Brekke, looking and acting a bit like the lovechild of Klaus Kinski) who's way over budget, which gives way to a call to his family waiting patiently (they have had practice, obviously) at their country house.  So, is our Gregoire some sort of fast-talking schmuck?   A terrible father?   Is it a troubled family? ...