Player Affinity writes: In recent years, there's been a big increase in the number of quality art-house films hitting theaters during the first half of the year. Last year, Winter's Bone and The Kids Are All Right carried their goodwill and relative box office success to Best Picture and Best Actress nominations. The year before, The Hurt Locker carried the same goodwill to a Best Picture win. And countless other films--Moon, Two Lovers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, A Prophet--earned distinctions on year-end best lists despite an early release date. In other words, December is no longer the only time an independent movie can succeed. Art-house cinema is a year-round enterprise, and in 2011, business has been booming. Here are some of the most respected indies of the year thus far, and their chances for Oscar recognition in 2012.
There is a fight at the heart of all of Malick’s films, a fight against the medium itself.
My favorite romance is a Gothic romance. The intersection of propriety, passion, and hints of the supernatural or the mystical gives us characters driven by fear as much as they are by love. It’s the starkest presentation of the act of love: a choice between sharing the self with another or choosing to remain safe and closed. Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre provides one of the single best depictions of that choice in recent memory.
FMV says: "Michael Fassbender is suitably brooding and cruel as Rochester, but the relationship between he and Jane in this adaptation of the classic story is never wholly believable."
