Pentecost (Ireland) — Damien’s parents are devout Irish Catholics who very much want their son to be an altar boy. Unfortunately, his first attempt ended in embarrassing and painful failure, and there wasn’t much chance of him being asked to try again. But as fate would have it, the church found themselves in desperate need of an altar boy only a couple of weeks later and Damien was once again called into service. Pentecost is full of laughs that make it quite enjoyable, but the comedy is primarily driven from the approach they decided to take with the film rather than poking fun at Catholicism or the church.

i>Raju (Germany and India) — When German husband and wife Jan and Sarah travel to India to adopt their new son Raju, they are overjoyed and Raju seems quite happy with the arrangement as well. They had planned on going out together for some sightseeing the next day, but when Sarah wasn’t feeling well, she told Jan to take Raju out by himself while she stayed at the hotel. They walked through a nearby market, and came to a group of people flying kites. They stopped to watch for a couple of minutes, but when Jan looked back down, Raju was gone. Raju is certainly the heaviest of the live-action shorts, as it’s the only one that doesn’t really have any comedy, but it also feels like the weakest. The acting is good and the story is interesting, but it does suffer from being a bit too long.

The Shore (Northern Ireland) — Joe and Paddy (Ciarán Hinds and Conleth Hill) were inseparable when they were growing up, but then something happened to end their friendship, and Joe moved to the United States. After 25 years, Joe has returned to try to patch things up, and he’s brought his daughter with him for encouragement. At just under half an hour, The Shore is even longer than Raju, and the end isn’t completely satisfying, but the time passes pretty quickly thanks to the injection of a fair amount of comedy into the script, and at least Ciarán Hinds should be a familiar face to many in the audience.

Time Freak (USA) — Stillman has been working on a time machine for quite a while, but now it seems like he’s finally figured it out. When his best friend Evan stops by, he learns that Stillman has already traveled through time many times, but he’s become a slave to his own obsessive-compulsive behavior. This is the least original of the Oscar-nominated shorts, but it’s also the funniest and the most concise.

Tuba Atlantic (Norway) — When Oskar is struck with chest pains, he goes to see his doctor and learns he’s only got about six days left to live. He had intended to live out his last few days at home alone trying to complete a project he’d started with his brother many years ago, but his solitude is interrupted by Inger who has been assigned to be his angel of death. Much like Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, Inger’s promotion to full angel is dependent upon her ability to accomplish the task assigned to her. This is another very funny film, and most of that comes from Oskar’s eccentricities. However, it’s not a pure comedy and it does get serious, just as you would expect when death is on the line.

They should have called it “Safe Bet” because that’s what it is. Take a bunch of well-known and well-liked action films, mash a number of key plot points together, and slap in some recognizable faces. That’s Safe House.

CIA agent Matt Weston (played by Ryan Reynolds) is in what seems like a dead-end post managing a safe house in South Africa, where nothing ever happens. He’d love a transfer, but there are others with more experience than he, but he’s not likely to get the necessary experience in the role he currently has. Of course, he wasn’t planning on having one of the CIA’s most wanted men, spy-turned-traitor Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington) delivered to his doorstep. Weston was just supposed to be the host while other agents tortured him to try to get him to talk, but the safe house fell under attack by others who wanted to make sure Frost was dead before he got the chance to talk. Weston and Frost managed to escape with their lives, but they weren’t out of the woods yet.

Weston got in touch with CIA headquarters to tell them of the attack, but bosses David and Catherine (Brendan Gleeson and Vera Farmiga) weren’t in a position to get him any help for several hours, and their best bet might be to get him to another safe house a few hours away. During this time, Weston and Frost would have to continue to elude the bad guys, and Weston would have to keep the highly-trained and very resourceful Frost from escaping. And it’d be great if he could figure out what Frost knows and why the attackers want him dead.

It’s pretty hard not to notice the things that Safe House has in common with a number of other films. It opens with what is clearly taken right out of Assault on Precinct 13 (in which a jail falls under attack by people who want to kill a high-profile prisoner), and it fairly quickly transitions into 16 Blocks (in which a police officer needs to transport a prisoner from jail to a courthouse to stand trial while others are very intent on ensuring that he doesn’t make it). There are also unmistakable similarities with The Bourne Identity and Mission: Impossible. Unfortunately, Safe House doesn’t live up to any of the films that were its inspiration.

Even with a number of other films from which to draw, Safe House can’t avoid falling into a number of traps. It relies far too much on implausible coincidence. It has a couple of plot twists, but they were pretty easy to see coming, even after having seen only the trailer. And one of the most important plot points lies in trying to figure out how the bad guys managed to find the safe house, but when a completely plausible explanation was suggested, it was immediately discarded for no good reason.

If you’ve never seen it, you’d be better off watching Assault on Precinct 13. The original 1976 version by John Carpenter is best, but even the 2005 remake is better than Safe House.

Cats have a reputation for being incredibly lazy, and in my (admittedly limited) experience, that reputation is well deserved. That may be why Lassie doesn’t have any real feline counterpart, and it seems like if cats are portrayed in film or television with any real activity, they’re often the bad guy (e.g., Sylvester with Tweety or Tom with Jerry). But I guess Dino the cat didn’t get that message.

If it weren’t for Dino, Zoë would be very alone. The daughter of two police officers, her father was recently killed by local gangster Victor Costa, and her mother spends virtually all of her time trying to track him down. Zoë’s nanny Claudia isn’t particularly affectionate, so Dino is just about all the companionship she gets. She loves that Dino brings her gifts every morning (often in the form of a dead lizard), but neither her mother nor Claudia share that sentiment.

Dino’s custom of bringing Zoë gifts every morning is just the end of a long night for him. He has a whole second life that Zoë doesn’t know anything about. Dino has gotten in the habit of sneaking out every night, and after a brief pause to torment a neighbor’s dog, he continues on to Nico’s apartment, where the two of them are pretty successful burglars. Actually, Nico is the burglar, while Dino is more just a companion and watchcat. But when fate brings them all together, the line between good and bad becomes blurred.

A Cat in Paris combines a sweet story with classic (and refreshing) 2D hand-drawn animation and a short 70-minute runtime that makes it a joy to watch. It’s funny, both in dialog and in slapstick-style action. It’s a pretty kid-friendly movie (at least for kids who can speak French or read English), but it’s not dumbed down or unnecessarily shallow, so there’s a lot for older people to enjoy as well.

It’s not hard to see why it’s been nominated for an Academy Award for best animated feature (alongside American films Kung Fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots, and Rango, and the Spanish film Chico & Rita), but I’m puzzled as to why it hasn’t been made more widely available. It’s only played once in Austin, and that’s only because of its Oscar nomination, but I’m hopeful there will be other opportunities to see it in the near future.

It seems that every new 3D movie that comes out is heralded as the greatest achievement in 3D so far. I avoid most of these films entirely, or try to see a 2D screening, but there have been a few films in which this is simply not possible. I have yet to see a live-action 3D film in which the use of 3D has been anything but a detraction from the movie, and Pina (pronounced pee-nuh, not peen-ya like everyone seems to think) is now the best example I’ve seen of how the use of 3D can absolutely cause irreparable harm to a film. But Pina is a failure on just about every other level as well, so it’s not like it would have been good if it had been in 2D. It just would have been a lot less bad.

Pina Bausch was a German choreographer who was known for a style of expressionist dancing called Tanztheater. Some of her most noted dances include Café Müller (which takes place in what looks like a ransacked restaurant with dancers who appear to be imitating mentally handicapped zombies) and Rite of Spring (whose dirt-covered stage may well have been the inspiration for the soil room in Zoolander), and Pina provides performances of these and other works by some of the most aggressively ugly people I have ever seen. For the most part, the film is a sequence of dance numbers, but there are a handful of “talking head” scenes in which the dancers talk about their experiences with Bausch, except that it’s not really talking heads because the people are just sitting there while their separately-recorded commentary is played. I suppose those scenes are what allow the movie to be considered a documentary, but it is absolutely a crime for the film to receive an Oscar nomination for best documentary when truly spectacular documentaries like Senna, Tabloid, and Thunder Soul went unrecognized.

I am absolutely baffled at how anyone could consider the 3D in Pina to be anything short of abysmal. It committed just about every transgression possible for a 3D film. It doesn’t use infinite depth of focus, which means that only part of the scene is in focus while other things in the background are blurry. It is plagued by horrible ghosting, and this even frequently impacts the subtitles used to indicate what non-English speakers are saying. The illusion breaks down when there’s fast motion (like a lot of the dancing, but it’s also particularly bad in one scene with a leaf blower, and in several scenes with rain or falling drops of water) or when there’s something between the camera and the subject (like filming through glass, sheer cloth, or falling drops of water). Chain link fences seem to be the absolute bane of 3D, since there can be extreme differences in depth of the fence itself and what you can see through it, and Pina has one of those, too. At least some of the 3D was added or “enhanced” in post-production, and as a result we get a handful of items which look flat and/or have an odd kind of sparkle to them.

While the poor 3D is certainly the most obvious problem with the film, I had other issues with it as well. I found lighting to be a problem throughout the movie, with some scenes that are so dark that it’s hard to make out detail and others having such excessive backlighting that the action is washed out and equally hard to see. There is more than one lens flare, in which the light source creates a reflection off the camera lens that is visible in the film (which also cause serious harm to the illusion of 3D), and at least one scene in which the dancers are holding lights which are occasionally pointed directly at the cameras.

The subtitles are also poorly executed. Although there isn’t a lot of talking, a lot of the talking that is included is non-English, and there are a wide variety of languages represented by the various dancers. Unfortunately, the subtitles have 3D effects, which often makes them hard to read, and even if they were completely flat, it’s less than ideal having to read them through 3D glasses. I also found it difficult to follow on a couple of occasions in which someone started a sentence in language other than English, but then about halfway through changed to English (often with a heavy accent), and subtitles were only provided for the non-English part of the sentence. This means that you have to listen carefully to what is being said because it’s easy to be taken off-guard when you have to switch from understanding what you’re reading to understanding what you’re hearing mid-sentence.

I could go on listing faults, but I don’t really want to keep beating a dead horse. There is some dance in the film that is genuinely fun and innovative, although I found most of it to be featured in the trailer. I actually had high hopes for the movie based on its trailer and its Oscar nomination, but the repeated and pervasive failures just serve to make it a big disappointment.

My knowledge of art is pretty limited, and my knowledge of design is virtually nonexistent, so I don’t find it surprising that I hadn’t heard of the husband-and-wife team of Charles and Ray Eames. But because they did most of their work between World War 2 and America’s bicentennial (the year before I was born), and because some of their most well-known contributions are in furniture design, I don’t feel too bad about it, either. But even if they aren’t household names, that doesn’t mean their story isn’t interesting.

Charles Eames and Ray Kaiser (a woman, despite her masculine name) first gained notoriety in the art world with the creation of a new kind of chair, with the goal of being inexpensive to create and easy to mass produce. The design they created won significant praise, and Time Magazine called it one of the greatest designs of the 20th century. Unfortunately, World War II broke out before they could begin actually manufacturing it, but they instead used their abilities to design a new kind of splint for the military, and when the war was over they were able to use the experience gained from designing the splint into perfecting their chair. With their new-found success, and a contract from Herman Miller, Charles and Ray opened an office where they would do their creative works for the next several decades.

Their forays into the art world went much further than furniture design, and they often found success in unusual places. For example, when they demonstrated a unique approach to making films, they found themselves tasked with creating a film to help represent American life to Russian citizens, followed by a number of commissions from big businesses like IBM and Boeing to create films that made them seem more relatable to the average person. The Eames home in itself was a work of art, and evolved over time to reflect their perspectives.

Although Charles and Ray did design their house as a kind of work of art, that’s about the extent of the architecture in the film (at least in the classical sense of designing buildings). It does delve a little further into general design with a discussion of their chairs and other forms of more functional works, but it’s really more a biography of artists than a discussion of art. I haven’t seen a lot of art-focused documentaries, but I’d say there are more similarities with films like Art & Copy (a documentary about advertising, where the work is very accessible to and intended for the general public) and Marwencol (a documentary about a man who uses photography and miniatures to cope with brain damage, where it takes a look at fascinating people) than films which depict art in more abstract forms and in which the goal is perhaps more art for art’s sake than general appeal (which is kind of the direction taken by Exit Through the Gift Shop). I don’t think that Eames: The Architect & The Painter is quite on the same level as these other films, but at the time of this writing, they are all currently available on the Netflix streaming service, so you can watch them and decide for yourself.

With the exception of 3D, found footage seems to be one of the most overused of Hollywood gimmicks. It’s certainly true that there are some good examples, like [REC], Undocumented, and TrollHunter, but most of the time it doesn’t actually help the story (which is usually weak to start with) and only serves to introduce plot holes. Chronicle is the latest entry in the string of found footage titles, and while it’s a good movie, the found footage element is yet again unnecessary and detracting.

Andrew (Dane DeHaan) is a high school student with a pretty crappy life. His mother is bedridden and near death. His father had been a fireman before he got into an accident and retired on disability insurance, but now spends most of his time drunk and violently taking out his frustrations on Andrew. It’s gotten bad enough that he bought a video camera and has decided to begin filming his entire life. This didn’t do much to help his social status at school, where he was already something of an outcast, and his constant filming is yet another excuse for him to get bullied.

Andrew’s cousin Matt (Alex Russell) is friends with star athlete and class presidential candidate Steve (Michael B. Jordan), and they enlist Andrew (or more accurately, the video camera that comes with him) to go with them to investigate a weird hole they found in the ground near a party. When they investigate, they find what appears to be some kind of alien craft, and after this one brief encounter with it, they discover that they have acquired some kind of telekinetic powers. They can manipulate things using only their minds, and while their first attempts are typical high school pranks, they quickly move beyond that and start to exploit their powers for other purposes.

I was quite pleasantly surprised by the direction that the film took. While it had a brief (but still fun) stint in Zapped! territory (in which Scott Baio develops telekinetic powers, but primarily uses them to manipulate women’s clothing), I was glad to see it progress into more significant and intellectually stimulating uses. It’s most definitely not a run-of-the-mill sci-fi thriller, and I would not have predicted its ultimate direction from its trailer.

While the story is something that I quite enjoyed, I did find the “found footage” aspect of it to be somewhat annoying and completely unnecessary. I think that the story could have been told just as effectively from a completely third-person perspective, and without the need for them to keep inventing reasons for the characters to have cameras, and coming up with ways to get interesting shots from those cameras. There were cases in which it seemed unnatural to have a camera capturing the action, and some of what was recorded would very likely not have been accessible to whatever unseen editor put together all of the footage to create what we ultimately got to see as the movie.

Although the found footage element was ultimately detrimental to the film, the quality of the story and the acting make it possible to overlook those problems. We are then left with a very decent film, and one that I expect would be entertaining to teens and adults alike.

Hammer Film Productions is a British company with decades of experience creating films, especially horror and monster movies, like The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Quatermass Xperiment. They were something of a powerhouse through the mid 1980s, but then went mostly dark until 2010 with Let Me In, the unnecessary remake of the excellent Swedish Let the Right One In, and followed that up with several less well-known releases in 2011. With The Woman in Black, they’re back in the mainstream with a pretty decent thriller.

Set in 1920s Britain, the film focuses on Arthur Kipps (played by Daniel Radcliffe), a man whose work for a local law firm has been suffering since his wife died giving birth to their son Joseph a few years ago. His boss has had enough and is giving him just one more chance to keep his job. The firm has been put in charge of the remote estate of a recently-deceased woman, and the man who had been assigned to oversee the execution of the will had completely dropped the ball. Arthur must travel to the isolated and eerily-named Eel Marsh to sort through all her papers and ensure that the estate is handled according to her will.

On the train to the nearest town, Arthur meets an exceptionally nice man who introduces himself as Samuel Daily (played by Ciarán Hinds) and offers to give him a ride from the train station to his hotel, so he doesn’t have to make the long walk in the rain, and invites Arthur to dine with him and his wife Elizabeth the next evening. But upon arriving at the hotel, Arthur learns that not all of the townspeople are as nice as Sam, and he gets the distinct impression that he’s not welcome. They’d very much appreciate it if he just got right back on the train and went home to London. Of course he declines, but perhaps it would have been better for everybody if he had listened.

The Woman in Black may not be the greatest horror film of the year (or even of the weekend, which also includes the excellent We Need to Talk About Kevin and the very good The Innkeepers), but it’s still pretty good. Most of the scares are of the cheap variety, in the form of sudden movement punctuated by loud music, but they work fairly well, and they’re interspersed with enough of the “something slowly moving in the background” variety that you have to pay fairly close attention, so the jumps are even more startling.

I am a little disappointed by the motivation for the horror in the film. It’s a pretty common premise, with a spirit hanging around because something is left unfinished, but it’s vastly less honorable and more unprovoked than similar stories from other films. Whereas you often have the ability to develop a measure of sympathy for the spirit, I did not get that at all in this case, and the end was much less satisfying as a result.

Even with its faults, The Woman in Black is a much better horror movie than the majority of what gets pumped out, and I went in with fairly low expectations, which allowed me to be pleasantly surprised. It’s far from perfect, but it may be worth checking out if you’re into this kind of thing, and it gives hope for a Hammer resurgence.

Postpartum depression is a fairly common occurrence in new mothers as their body adjusts to the massive hormonal changes in addition to other factors like lack of sleep and a complete upheaval of life as they previously knew it. Often this happens within a couple of months of childbirth, but for Eva Khatchadourian (played by Tilda Swinton), it came on within minutes of delivering Kevin (played at various ages by Rock Duer, Jasper Newell, and finally Ezra Miller). That feeling of disconnectedness didn’t subside as Kevin began to grow, however, because he was far from a normal child, especially around her. Although doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, Kevin initially refused to speak or otherwise acknowledge Eva in any way, and he continued to wear diapers (and make use of them) far beyond the age at which he should have been able to exhibit control over his bodily functions. To add insult to injury, though, he was a real daddy’s boy, and was completely normal and even apparently happy around his father Franklin (John C. Reilly).

When we jump ahead in time to a point when Kevin is in his late teens, we can tell that something is seriously wrong, although we can only guess at what that is. The townspeople seem to genuinely hate Eva and have taken to quite bold measures to express their feelings. Her house and car are vandalized with red paint. People stare and glare in public, some avoiding her, some making their detestation known in other means. And she, clearly unhappy, takes it in stride as if it’s her lot in life and their outrage fully justified.

The story behind We Need to Talk About Kevin is revealed in a very nonlinear fashion, with parallel storylines from past and present interspersed and occasionally cut with other out-of-sequence peeks into the lives of those involved. This all helps to build tension, allowing the audience to know that the story is progressing toward something truly awful while simultaneously preventing us from knowing exactly what that is. It leads to confusion and suspense, keeping the audience on edge and prepared for just about anything, except that we’re really not quite prepared for everything.

Film history is littered with evil children, like Damien from The Omen, Christine from The Bad Seed, Michael Myers from Halloween, and all the kids from The Devil Times Five. But the really creepy ones are those who are evil for no apparent reason, and Kevin falls in extremely well there. All the actors who played Kevin were very effective, but Ezra Miller stands out in both appearance and behavior. His black hair, pale face, and bright lips really accentuate his creepy expressions that get the point across with only the slightest hint of emotion. It’s not at all hard to believe that he’s capable of anything, and it doesn’t hurt that this is also well established by what we see in younger versions portrayed by younger actors.

Tilda Swinton also gave an inspired performance, as is usually the case, and it was the perfect compliment to the creepiness exhibited by her character’s son. It’s inconceivable that neither Swinton nor Miller nor anything else in the film were nominated for Oscars, although it has its share of nominations and wins for other kinds of awards. John C. Reilly gave a good enough performance in his role, but it wasn’t a particularly significant character in the grand scheme of things, so it probably won’t be the topic of much conversation.

My primary complaint with the movie lies in its very last scene, which I feel softens the final tone and humanizes Kevin to the film’s detriment. I like the beginning of that scene, but I think that if it had been edited so that it ended a few seconds earlier, then it would have been much more powerful. This probably wouldn’t have been as much an issue if it hadn’t been the last thing in the movie, and therefore is likely to be stuck in your mind as you walk out of the theater. It’s a shame we were left with “it’s a great movie, except” instead of just “it’s a great movie”, but given everything else in the film, that’s easily forgiven.

Sometimes all that it takes to convince me to watch a movie is to see that it’s playing at an Alamo Drafthouse theater. That was the case with Dragonslayer, although it didn’t hurt that it was sandwiched between a couple of other movies that I wanted to see. I bought the ticket without reading the description, assuming it to be the 1981 Peter MacNichol film of the same name. When I looked more closely and saw it to be a new skating documentary, I was still hopeful because even I don’t like skating, the film won an award for best documentary at the 2011 SxSW film festival. I can only assume it must not have had much competition.

The documentary focuses on Josh Sandoval, better known as Skreech. He’s a professional skateboarder (at least to the extent that he has sponsors who pay for some of his stuff), but it seems like a lot more of his income is from selling marijuana than skating prizes. He’s always broke and spends what little he has on drinking and drugs, but he lives a meager life and leeches as much as possible off his friends. He’s got a baby that he has largely abandoned, providing no financial support and rarely any contact, and he’s got a young girlfriend who seemed like she had a promising future before she met him.

Skreech travels a lot, and although many of the places he goes have skate parks, he often ends up skating in empty swimming pools. The down economy helps with that, since there are a number of uninhabited homes with private pools, and he even enlists the help of friends with computers to fire up Google Maps in order to scope out possible locations. Skating in swimming pools offers a number of challenges that skate parks don’t, primarily in the form of obstacles that need to be avoided. The sides are littered with jets and filters, there are often steps in the corner, and sometimes tiles make for an uneven surface. It’s frequently necessary to sop up small amounts of standing rainwater, and sometimes they have to avoid angry owners and neighbors.

I suppose that all of these challenges can perhaps account for the generally unimpressive nature of the skating. What we see in the movie is certainly not on par with what you’ll find in The X Games, and there are no 360s or handstands or grindy thingies on display here (even when they happen to be skating in a park instead of a pool). Mostly, they skate down one side and up the other, then back again. It’s probably vastly better than I could do (even after any amount of practice), but it’s pretty unimpressive when compared with what I had been expecting.

There’s also surprisingly less skating in the movie than I had expected. Much more of the time is spent watching Skreech’s uneventful life play out, watching him get drunk and/or high, complaining about the quality of his life, or hanging out with friends. He reveals in a sad, ripped-from-a-sitcom moment that the documentarians are there at his request, so we can add extreme (and exceedingly unwarranted) vanity to his long list of character flaws.

In many ways, Dragonslayer is a lot like Total Badass. Both tell the life stories of truly worthless and despicable people, but as the prevalence of reality television has shown, there are apparently a lot of worthless and despicable people in the world who like watching that sort of thing.

Liam Neeson has become the one of the go-to guys for action films, with his roles in Batman Begins and Taken bringing him to broad public attention in this regard. He was about the only good part of The A-Team movie, and if he is in Battleship then perhaps it won’t be as stupid as it sounds in premise. I’d heard good things from the early screening of The Grey at BNAT, and from press screenings, but I tried to go in with cautious optimism to not have my hopes up too high.

Neeson plays John Ottaway, a hunter working for an oil company in the hostile Alaskan wilderness. Wolves are a very real threat for oil workers, and when they’re hungry or threatened, then they’re not shy about approaching people, so it’s John’s job to take them out before someone gets mauled or eaten. He’s very good at his job, and his skills come in handy pretty often.

When a group of men, including Ottaway, get some time off, they board a plane headed for Anchorage. But when the plane encounters some particularly nasty weather, it’s struck by harsh turbulence that is eventually just too much for the small craft. The plane goes down, and many aboard die in the crash or shortly thereafter from injuries sustained in the crash, with the handful of survivors still in mortal danger of cold exposure. And then the wolves show up.

The film has an odd pacing that really works for it, with slow stretches abruptly interrupted by intense action. Sometimes you see what’s coming, but even then it often doesn’t diminish its effect. Neeson’s character remains relatively calm and level-headed, but he’s surrounded by some immensely unpleasant and irrational people which alternate between funny and annoying, although it never gets to the point of making the film hard to watch.

I only have a couple of minor complaints about the film. The first is that, while the film is only lightly scored, there is at least one place in which I felt that a score was used when it would have been better without music so that only the natural sounds of the environment were audible. The music didn’t seem to tip off what was about to happen, but I felt that it was sometimes unnecessary and potentially distracting. A second gripe is that it seemed there were a number of “let’s get philosophical around the campfire” scenes that seemed to adversely impact the film’s pacing and seemed a little out of place for the kinds of roughnecks doing the deep thinking. It’s certainly the case that facing your own mortality may cause a significant change in your behavior, but it doesn’t seem as likely for an idiot to suddenly turn into a scholar or a poet.

The Grey seems to be among the rare set of films that is well regarded by about everyone I know. There are certainly varying degrees of affection, but I haven’t talked to anyone who disliked it.