Last Year in Marienbad (L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad) (1961)

 

This French New Wave cinema from 1961, about a man and woman in a hotel trying to sync their memories of their meeting (or not) a year earlier, will either infuriate or mesmerise you depending on whether you are someone who might appreciate floating dream-like through the austere and quiet Marienbad hotel with its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear and its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear and its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear...or if you are someone who prefers Arnold Schwarzenegger action and care less about sublime cinematics and poetry, give "Last Year in Marienbad" a miss. 

★★★★☆

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The Lovely Bones (2009)

Like Patrick Swayze's Sam in Ghost, the girl in this movie moves into a limbo state after her murder, but unlike Sam in Ghost, her limbo (a dreamlike state like in The Cell) has no narrative purpose: while her presence is felt by her family members, it does nothing to help their investigation into her disappearance, and with no real connection to the events of the film, her limbo and her particularly daft Oda Mae Brown moment towards the movie's end are meaningless gimmicks in a long mystery-free drama about an absurd trap-building serial killer.

★☆☆☆☆

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Spellbound (1945)

The solution to the mystery relies on far too pat "dream detective" work and Ingrid Bergman's psychoanalyst's flight from police with a mentally ill stranger is a subplot rehashed from previous Hitchcock successes presumably as a counterbalance to this film's otherwise psychobabble plot, but Spellbound is still a joy full of humour, some tongue-in-cheek sexism (and some not) and is great fun with a Dali dream sequence and an intriguing Freudian mystery.

★★★★☆

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Premonition (2007)

Premonition seems like the wrong word at first because what Sandra Bullock's Linda Hanson experiences is more like a Sliding Doors-style double life - the life she has always lived and the other, a gothic nightmare featuring a dead husband, a disfigured child, empty pill bottles, and forced psychiatric incarceration - but as real life catches up to this nightmare future, the mystery of the premonitions becomes less bewildering, although it is never very involving and some details of the earlier-on premonitions are conveniently forgotten.

★★★☆☆

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Solaris (2002)

This American remake of the 1972 Russian 'Solyaris', about a psychologist summoned to a space station-in-distress, starts well by adopting the original's mesmerising tone with a sleek, sexy new look, and it certainly doesn't hurt that George Clooney's, um, natural acting talents are on regular display, but too quickly the movie starts spelling everything out, characters hurry to articulate their emotional crises, and the profound philosophical puzzle that was the original movie ends up a fairly monotonous, superficial romantic space drama here.

★★☆☆☆

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

Despite its worthwhile message and the fact it is based on the beloved James Thurber character, this ill-conceived, ponderous Ben Stiller vanity project is the pits, unsuccessfully melding comedy (wet), adventure (daft), sudden, unexpected pop culture spoof (bewildering), and endless product placement (shameless), and made even more unbearable by its cast of adults playing adults who act like children, all of them, from cloying start to maudlin finish.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Solaris (Solyaris) (1971)

A psychologist encounters a humanlike - um - lifeform on a space station in this austere, dreamlike sci-fi meditation on life, death, and what it is to be human.

★★★★★

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Inception (2010)

Watching Inception made me want to disappear into a manufactured dreamscape too, away from the relentless overlong nonsense of this Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle and hopefully away from the inevitable Inception 2 and even more bodgy Inception 3 in which no-name Australian actors fight for a reality that stripped of any matrices looks more than a little like a muddy rave event in Meredith.

★★☆☆☆

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