SHUTTER ISLAND – martin scorsese – 6.5 / 10

The reason that there are so many films about World War II has, I think, a lot to do with the Holocaust. A filmmaker can easily piggyback on the horror of the death camps as a sort of emotional shorthand. A few shots of emaciated corpses and grief-stricken loved ones and the film gains an instant amount of emotional credibility. Similarly, filmmakers so often give their main characters tragic pasts (dead wives, dead children, both in the case of Shutter Island) because it allows them to easily and without any real effort make the audience care about and feel for their protagonists. This tactic is clumsy and cheap but it’s undeniably effective.

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PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE – paul thomas anderson – 10 / 10

Even before the film begins, it’s abundantly clear that Punch-Drunk Love is something different. It’s a relatively short film from Paul Thomas Anderson, a director known for making very lengthy movies. And it’s a drama starring Adam Sandler, an actor known almost exclusively for his sophomoric comedies. Then the film begins and it becomes clear just how different it really is. But in this case, different is wonderful. Punch-Drunk Love bears almost no resemblance to any love story you’ve ever seen. Despite that or, perhaps more accurately, because of it, the film is able to evoke the joy, pain, unpredictability and volatility of love better than just about anything else out there.