Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski, 2006). While double-checking my spelling on IMDb, I discovered that this film was tagged as "mumblecore" and I had a small moment of panic. Are we actually going to move into an era in which film genres are divided up and over-defined until it reaches the ludicrous extremes music is now at with a mind-numbing succession of subdivisions? Bujalski's follow-up to the winning Funny Ha Ha is very much in the same downbeat tone with unpolished black-and-white cinematography to make it feel even more muted. The film follows three characters as they deal with relationships and aspirations, but it's mostly about that sense of personal drift that saturates the air during the post-collegiate years. There's a nice tangy humor throughout and every detail--the softly decrepit houses, the mundane parties populated by a handful of people, the late-night, drunken conversations filled with hesitant bravery--all feel so spot on that they could have been transcribed from real life. Forget about the plot details and this is what my life looked like back then. Or it would have if I had lived with my smart, cool friends at that time instead of my actual roommates who were like stoned and therefore less social versions of the guys from Swingers. Anyway, the film is solidly enjoyable about quietly gripping. It's also good, apparently, if you like mumblecore.

Skidoo (Otto Preminger, 1968). It's just your average film featuring an incarcerated Jackie Gleason having a revelatory acid trip, Carol Channing performing an awkward musical number accompanied by marauding hippies, hallucinations of the Green Bay Packers playing football naked and culminates with an elderly Groucho Marx adrift on a sailboat smoking a pumpkin-flavored joint. Right before the closing credits are sung by Harry Nilsson. How many treasures can one cavern hold? This sprawling disaster from Otto Preminger is seen rarely enough that longtime television and comic book writer Mark Evanier felt compelled to create his own promotional material for the television screening when Turner Classic Movies announced that it would be part of their "Underground" film series (and how I wish original "Underground" host Rob Zombie was still around the introduce this one). It's genuine lunacy, a collection of baffling choices and inane ideas stitched together like a quilt crafted by a over-caffeinated charm of ADD-afflicted hummingbirds. Marx is obviously reading from cue cards most of the time, Gleason is perpetually irritated and the much of the rest of the cast indicates that Preminger had so much fun playing Mr. Freeze on the "Batman" TV series that he looked to his fellow rogues gallery members when it came to the delicate task of casting this grand debacle.

Our Brand is Crisis (Rachel Boynton, 2006). As the "Bush Doctrine" of spreading democracy at gunpoint continues banging blindly into walls, it's tempting to view Crisis as proof that democracy isn't actually a miracle corrective to all the world's problems. I think a more accurate reading of the film is that it demonstrates that American-style democracy, stoked by focus groups and devious language parsing and negative campaigning, is downright poisonous. We've become immune to its harshest effects through well-administered doses of cynicism. In a place like Bolivia, there may actually be an expectation that promises will eventually yield corresponding results. Boynton's damning documentary follows political consultants from Greenberg Carville Shrum (including former Bill Clinton campaigner James Carville, who literally froths at the mouth when he talks political maneuvering) as they work to get Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada elected president of Bolivia in 2002. It's dispiriting to see the various players utterly disinterested in things like policy and improving the lives of citizens because their preoccupied with high-fiving one another any time one of their commercials scores a political point. The film is rich with sadly telling moments, perhaps none more abysmal than U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha responding to a criticism of U.S. policy by automatically putting the offending speaker in league with Osama Bin Laden, a harsh reminder that the American government's kneejerk response to any sort of dissent was pervasive enough to contribute to our rapid erosion of the country's international goodwill.

The Indian Runner (Sean Penn, 1991). The directorial debut from Penn takes inspiration from a Bruce Springsteen song from Nebraska, and, at its best, it has the same considered quiet intensity of all of the songs of stark weather that populate that album. By the end, Penn has caved into his worst instincts and let cheesy imagery overtake the film just enough to undercut the well-earned heavy emotions of the material. Casting David Morse in the lead is as welcome as it is unlikely. Bringing in Viggo Mortensen to play a more violent trouble brother in this drama is more problematic since this is well before his transformational work with Peter Jackson and, more crucially, David Cronenberg so he still has a pesky tendency to overplay everything. Most of Penn's writing here is lean and affecting, but he misses the chance to make something truly great because he can't apply the same discipline to the rest of the film.

Once (John Carney, 2007). The cynic in me resisted seeing this film when it was in theaters. Sometimes the cynic in me is sort of a dumb ass. Carney's meditation on love, attraction and the grace to be found in making music is a tender charmer, full of perfectly pitched naturalistic dialogue and remarkably unshowy little achievements. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova give the sort of open-hearted performances completely free of calculation that could only come from novice actors (and can only be pulled off once). Watching their interaction together is like spying on a couple in a corner that are immersed in another to the exclusion of the rest of the world. Carney shows incredible patience, letting whole songs play out with minimal distraction, most notably with the initial duet on "Falling Slowly" and a nighttime neighborhood stroll that accompanies "If You Want Me." These are great scenes that hint at the filmmaking integrity that Carney will carry through to the very last moment.