There’s nothing like a sci-fi film in space: the impossibility of giant tin cans floating in the void and the people stuck in them. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is the latest addition to the genre. It’s a visually stunning film, first of all: spaceship interiors floodlit and bleached orange by the sun, golden shields rotating in space, creepy subliminal flashes, plus a damn good-looking cast (Michelle Yeoh! Rose Byrne! Cillian Murphy!). The sun is apparently dying, and an intrepid (of course they’re intrepid) multicultural (of course they’re multicultural) team of astronauts are burdened with dreams of the apocalypse (of course they’re burdened with dreams of the apocalypse) and a bomb the size of Manhattan, which they plan to drop on the sun to create a new star. (My students, who apparently know better, told me it wouldn’t work.) Alas, all this agreeable tension gets ejected into space after the introduction of a total wild card in the third act, which subsequently turns the film into something it shouldn’t be. (Plus you don’t put Michelle Yeoh in a film and not have her kick some ass.)

Jaume Balagueró’s Fragile is a more than competent horror film with the requisite elements: a creaky children’s hospital with a boarded-up second floor, ailing children who see things, and the tough heroine with the fragile exterior. The said protagonist happens to be Calista Flockhart minus the short skirts, and she plays the replacement night nurse - her predecessor got spooked and left - who then witnesses what the kids repeatedly warned her about. Fairly gripping and atmospheric all in all, though marred by an ending that seemed too much of a Street Fighter-like showdown.

There’s no meat in Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later—well, there’s a lot of it, actually (chewed up, mangled by helicopter blade, torn to shreds by machine gun fire, incinerated by flame thrower) but the stripped-down narrative is strictly about getting people from Point A to Point B and wondering which member of the team gets eaten alive in the process. I think I’m all alone in giving this a must-see recommendation (fans and critics both hated it, probably because it jettisons the political allegory of Danny Boyle’s first film), but the action sequences have an appealing, telegraphic visual style to them that reminds me of the ending of Richard Linklater’s Slacker: throw a running camera in the air and see what gets caught on film.

Saw Samuel Fuller’s White Dog on the big screen. (For those of you who don’t know it, it’s Fuller’s unreleased movie about a German shepherd specifically trained to attack black people.) I still don’t know what to make of it - a somewhat ham-fisted if certainly original attempt to address racism (though movies like Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon were much worse), terrible acting from Kristy McNichol, dialogue (co-written by Curtis Hanson) that’s really unable to transcend its pulpy origins - but there’s something about the movie that gets under your skin. (This mainly has to do with the anti-racist dog de-trainer played by Paul Winfield, whose nobility of intentions places him on the continuum of Noble African American Men of Hollywood, but it’s a compelling role nonetheless.)

Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne boasts an excellent ensemble cast - it’s hard to beat Laura Linney and Gabriel Byrne - and this adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story (also borrowed for Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, i.e., the unnecessarily misogynist Huey-Lewis-pissing-into-a-river segment) does a fine job of illustrating the domestic frustrations that erupt to the surface when basic human decency is tested. But god almighty, is it ruined by a red herring of a subplot that thankfully goes nowhere and one of the most appallingly mawkish endings I’ve seen in a while.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s superb Hana is that rarest of things: a samurai comedy. Junichi Okada from V6 has sworn to avenge the death of his father - except that he’s something of an incompetent samurai, and prefers teaching the local kids how to write. Romance, drama, legacies passed on from father to son, the theater, the meaning of revenge - they’re all here in this excellent film (although it’s not Afterlife, for sure).

Unfortunately I popped a Benadryl (my allergies are really awful these days) just before seeing Pedro Costa’s exquisite Colossal Youth, which was the movie I was most excited to see during the SF Film Festival. Not good, because Costa stretches his long takes to the absolute breaking point (though I probably only drifted off for only a few seconds each time). Hey, at least I happily stayed through the whole thing; people were leaving in droves!

(I didn’t “get it,” though I stopped having that reaction to a film a long time ago.) What was certainly most memorable was the rigorously composed frame, mostly with the tall, dazed lead character - Costa gets a lot of mileage from dressing him in all black - cutting obliquely across the screen. What a movie though: ghosts refusing to quit haunting burnt-out shells of buildings, shuffling in stained and chipped hallways, reciting letters never sent, standing in ruined pools of light.

Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse is up there with Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (and Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence) as one of my favorites this year so far.

And in case anyone wanted to know: QT’s was better than RR’s. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that Eli Roth’s “preview” for Thanksgiving was better than Planet Terror. And indeed I’ll go out on another limb and say that Death Proof is probably Tarantino’s best work since Pulp Fiction. It’s a structural marvel, plus Tarantino lets his characters simply luxuriate in the pleasures of the rhythm of simple conversation. Words, speed and metal—yeah.

There’s little I can add to the rapturous reviews of Philip Gröning’s Into Great Silence- an almost three-hour documentary on a Carthusian monastery in France and its monks who have taken a vow to live their lives as silently as possible. It’s not nearly as forbidding as it sounds, even if there is no voiceover narration, or hardly any subtitles - there is no need for them for the most part—or no artificial light. (Some of the most beautiful passages in the film are set at Vespers, sometimes lit only by a lone candle.)

The monks do speak, for starters, and the part Gröning chooses to show is their rather funny quibbling about certain rituals. But immediately, at the beginning of the film, the audience is already drawn into contemplation: we watch a monk, barely discernible in the dim light, kneeling in prayer, for about half a minute; he stands, adjusts the heater in his bare room, and kneels again.

The theme of the eternal present is movingly raised by an elderly blind monk, testifying joyfully about his blindness and his peaceful embrace of his mortality. There are no distinctions between past or present with God, the monk says; only the present prevails, and when He sees us, he always sees our entire life. In contrast, the ineluctable passage of time is seen outside the monastery: seasons follow one another, the snows end and the blooms appear. (Gröning also presents the monks not as timeless, ahistorical figures: one monk puzzles over bills on an IBM Thinkpad, another practices his singing on a small keyboard, airplanes fly overhead.)

The cinematography, both intimate and grand, is something else: some high-definition video shots echo the Old Masters in their composition; we see, in painstaking detail, new leaves peeking through still-frosted stems, or the slow drop of water from a bucket. (Indeed, the swarming motes in the grainy Super-8 footage - sometimes, of nothing but blue sky or gray cloud - suggest a perpetual movement in what is ostensibly still.) Gröning also gets a lot of mileage from close-ups of shaved heads, the camera peering over monks’ shoulders as they read or pray, inviting the audience to imagine the secrets inside their skulls, to wonder about what inspires such devotion.

Viewers will come away with different things. For me it was the effortless way in which the deeply ordinary was invested with a deep, spiritual gravity; they shovel snow, feed cats, saw wood, sing, and kneel in prayer, and somehow the divine is felt as a trace, lingering in all their labors. There is a scene, for instance, in which a monk repairs a shoe, and his simple act of blowing on the glue to dry it becomes, in the world of Into Great Silence, the seeming exhalation of a prayer. The less generous will wonder about the political implications of a retreat from all the sorrows of the world. But many will surely remark upon the temporary transformation of the movie theater into an extension of the monastery; indeed, the hush follows you outside into the night as you leave.

The Number 23 isn’t unwatchable by any means, but its particular brand of awfulness deserves a little explanation. Directed by affable hack Joel Schumacher, the movie is part of what I’d call the post-Memento film, featuring unreliable narrators, plots that twist upon each other, suitably grimy production design that screams “I must be insane because I wrote all over the walls,” and the pleasures of the readerly text. Its saving grace is that it doesn’t constantly tease you - “constantly” being the operative term here - with “Was that real, or did he just dream that?” At least the whole thing is wrapped up neatly with a bow at the end, which is the least one can demand after having to sit through this.

Tonally, the film is all wrong, too. The pulpy novel that propels Walter Sparrow, Pet Detective, into his Downward Spiral Into Madness is meant to be badly-written hardboiled dialogue - actually, most of it is badly written period - but Schumacher seems to take it fairly seriously. Instead we get Jim Carrey doing his best brooding Colin Farrell impersonation; it’s a problem when the audience isn’t sure whether to interpret this as camp. (To his credit, the writer makes Carrey’s character a dog catcher; this can only be deliberate, considering one of Carrey’s most famous roles, but some sequences - particularly when Sparrow is pursued by the Hound of Heaven - are inadvertently funny.)

In short, the best thing about the movie is Virginia Madsen’s cheekbones, and they’re not reason enough to watch it.

(And to Mr. Schumacher: when your oeuvre contains the infamous “Fi’ cent” scene from Falling Down, it’s not very cool to start with an elaborate, unfunny joke that ends with the punchline “In China, people eat dogs.”)