Police officers have a tough job. They’re hated by criminals, for obvious reasons, but they’re also often disliked by the general law-abiding public because at least the perception is that they abuse the power they’ve been given. Certainly the majority of them are better than planting evidence or beating someone mercilessly, but if you’ve ever seen a police car turn on its lights and siren just to blow through a red light, or breaking the speed limit in a non-emergency situation, or worse yet driving below the speed limit and impeding the flow of traffic because people are afraid to pass them, then you’ve probably at least been frustrated by this. And when a truly corrupt cop is depicted, like in Rampart, it’s not hard to buy the story.

Officer David Brown (played by Woody Harrelson) is a real piece of work. He has two daughters who are both sisters and first cousins because their mothers are sisters. He has a drinking problem, an eating disorder, and may be a sex addict. He’s also a police officer who doesn’t feel bound by the law himself, but has no problem taking down bad guys, and often uses what he knows to blackmail them into giving him stuff or to give him information about other criminal activities that may be going down. He earned the nickname “date rape” when he allegedly killed an alleged serial rapist 15 years ago, but since he studied law before becoming a police officer, he’s able to make the legal system work for him and he always manages to stay out of trouble.

It’s 1999 in Los Angeles, and the city has been rocked by the Rodney King beatings. The district attorney’s office is out for blood, and it seems that someone in the police department thinks that David will make a good scapegoat. While he’s out on patrol one day, his car is T-boned at an intersection, and when he goes to check on the other driver, he’s knocked down by the car’s door when the driver starts to flee the scene. David gives chase and catches him easily, and then begins beating him with his baton. There just happens to be a camera pointed in his direction, and the footage makes the evening news.

The film invests a lot of effort into making David an absolutely abhorrent and unlikeable person, and every turn seems to make him just a little bit more despicable. However, it’s also surprisingly easy to sympathize with him at the same time because he’s a bad guy, but he’s mostly bad to other bad guys. His family (including the sisters that were his former wives, played by Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche, and especially their daughters played by an almost unrecognizable Brie Larson and Sammy Boyarsky) are the real victims in all of this because they don’t get the kind of attention they want, but they have to deal with the mess that is his life. His youngest daughter has been sheltered from this all her life, but even she is starting to see the truth about him.

There is a surprising amount of star power in the film. In addition to those already mentioned, Rampart features Sigourney Weaver (as a lawyer for the police department), Steve Buscemi (as a district attorney), Robin Wright (as a lawyer in the DA’s office and occasional sex partner for David), Ned Beatty (as a former cop who serves as a confidant for David), and Ice Cube (as an investigator for the district attorney). There are also other faces you’ll recognize even if the names aren’t familiar. It’s a surprising cast for a second-time director (Owen Moverman, whose only other film is The Messenger, which also starred Harrelson), but he pulls it off well.

I think that some people will be put off by the overall tone of the film, and others will be disappointed with its ending. It’s not as satisfying as I would have liked, but with the events that led up to it, it’s hard to see how it could have ended in any other way.

Almost without exception, I find foreign films which have the voices dubbed in English to be much less enjoyable than those in which we hear the original actors speaking in the original language and have English subtitles. I say “almost”, though, because there are exceptions, and Disney’s dubbing of the films of Studio Ghibli (including Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Castle in the Sky) is usually quite good. That tradition continues with The Secret World of Arrietty, which has surprisingly been dubbed in English twice — once for the UK and again with different voice actors for the US.

Shawn (voiced by David Henrie) has recently developed a heart condition and needs to rest before an upcoming surgery. His recently-divorced parents are both too busy to take care of him, so he’s been shipped off to live with his Aunt Jessica (Gracie Poletti) and her housekeeper Hara (Carol Burnett). Understandably, he’s feeling pretty sorry for himself, but his curiosity is piqued just a few minutes after his arrival because he’s sure that he saw the cat stalking a tiny little girl.

That girl was Arrietty (voiced by Bridgit Mendler), and she lives with her parents Homily and Pod (Amy Poehler and Will Arnett) underneath Jessica’s house. They’re called “borrowers” because they survive in large part by taking little things like sugar and crackers and whatever else they can scrounge from the humans (even though they never seem to give anything back, so it’s not really borrowing). Although they depend on the humans for their survival, they’re constantly frightened of being discovered because humans have historically not been kind to them, and if they’re seen, then it’s safest to just move away. And now they’ve just been seen.

Although The Secret World of Arrietty is cute, has a light, fun story, and is well animated, it deviates from other Studio Ghibli films (and their Disney adaptations) in a couple of ways. First, with a runtime of just over 90 minutes, it’s a full half hour shorter than most of the studio’s other films. I don’t think that this is a bad thing at all, since it’s able to fit everything it needs to into that runtime, it doesn’t feel either rushed or drawn out, and it’s a more kid-friendly length. Second, this is the first Studio Ghibli film in which I had any problem at all with the dubbing, with Will Arnett’s voice not seeming like a great fit for the animated character for which it was used. Although it was noticeable, it didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the film in any meaningful way.

I was also surprised by the degree to which Hara’s character had an irrational hatred of the little people, which had apparently been a life-long feeling even though she’d previously only heard stories about them. She characterized them as thieves, which is certainly accurate and perhaps they stole things they could have done without, but the borrowers’ extreme resemblance to humans made Hara’s persistent desire to eliminate them feel a lot like aspirations of genocide. But fortunately even if the film has somewhat dark themes, it never really reaches a point at which parents would have significant concern about whether it’s appropriate for their children.

Although my review of it may seem to have a largely negative tone, that’s probably because I had very high expectations for it going in based on my experience with many of the studio’s other films. I do think that it doesn’t quite stack up against the best of those, but it’s nevertheless a generally fun and well-produced film that should be enjoyable to people of nearly any age.

There are apparently three important rules that you should follow if you’re communicating with a spirit using a Ouija (pronounced wee-gee) board:

1. Don’t ask the spirit how it died, because it will likely upset the spirit.
2. Don’t ask the spirit how you’re going to die, because it will likely upset you.
3. Don’t walk away from the Ouija board without saying goodbye, because it’s a portal to the spirit world and leaving it open could allow the spirits to enter our world.

Any guesses as to which of these rules was broken (repeatedly) in The Ouija Experiment?

We begin with Brandon, a film student with his camera on and recording, in a car with classmate Shay on their way to meet Shay’s boyfriend Calvin, Calvin’s sister La’nette, and Calvin’s best friend Michael. Michael is interested in using a Ouija board to interact with the dead, but he’s less interested in having it filmed because he’s not sure whether the spirits will be camera shy. But of course Brandon leaves the camera rolling, and he captures what appears to be a conversation with a young girl named Gracie and later her 35-year-old mother Lisa. They soon learn that Gracie died by drowning (because it’s apparently OK to ask one spirit how another died, even when asking a mother about her child), and that both are afraid of another spirit who goes by the name of Joseph.

Their first Ouija experience having been a success, they decide to repeat the process. As before, they contact Gracie and Lisa, but when the questions start to become more personal (e.g., whether Calvin is cheating on Shay and with whom), arguments arise and in the confusion the board is left open. Shortly after that, they begin having unusual, and frightening, experiences.

According to the filmmakers, the “experiment” of The Ouija Experiment was in the challenge of creating a credible film on a micro-budget (about $1000), with only a rough outline and heavy improvisation, and using self-distribution and social media to try to create buzz (like the despicable practice of Twitter spamming). Although they have undeniably had a measure of success because they did make the film and I did see it in the theater, there were also numerous failures. It’s not a very good movie, there are certainly cases in which you can tell that it needed a better script, and the only way I knew anything about it was that it showed up on the Drafthouse calendar.

In many ways, The Ouija Experiment is very similar to Paranormal Activity. It relies on the found footage gimmick and people filming every aspect of their lives (including at one point, recording themselves watching footage they had previously recorded, although in The Ouija Experiment with a significant inconsistency in this regard), but there is one key scene which isn’t found footage and isn’t from the perspective of anyone in the story. Our first experience with spirits in the real world comes first through minor things like pictures knocked over or upside down, then by hearing noises and seeing things move, and finally we see the spirits themselves. It really does very little to distinguish itself from Paranormal Activity, or from other films of that ilk, and it has a lot of problems that can’t be overlooked.

Director Israel Luna mentioned that this film was essentially a remake of a film called Is Anybody There? he had made about ten years earlier. Had the film been released then when the idea was still relatively new, and had it not unnecessarily relied on the extremely over-used found footage gimmick, then perhaps it would have been better received. But it isn’t well suited to the current market, where a tiny budget doesn’t excuse an unremarkable film.

Dimanche (Canada) — A very crudely-drawn look at a boy living in a world that is not his own. He lives with a couple of elderly people, perhaps his grandparents, who don’t pay a whole lot of attention to him and don’t have much to offer in the way of entertainment. About the only pastime he enjoys is placing coins on the nearby tracks and watching them be flattened by passing trains. It’s pretty lacking in both depth of story and quality of animation, and it’s surprising that this would be considered among the top five of all animated short films produced in the year.

A Morning Stroll (UK) — An interesting look at a story set in three times. It opens in 1959 with extremely crude black-and-white line art animation and shows a man slowly walking down the street, paying attention to everything he passes. We then jump ahead to 2009 and see much better quality animation, in color and more detail. A man is again walking down the street, but this time completely engrossed in his cell phone and not paying attention to anything or anyone else. Another 50-year jump brings us to 2059 and yet another walk with even better animation and a new take on the theme. I was unimpressed with its first segment, but then it won me over with the second and third, when it became clear that it was a more complex story than it first appeared.

Wild Life (Canada) — The film opens with footage from an old black-and-white video encouraging people to come to Canada. One young British man must have seen this because he finds himself stepping off a train in a sparsely-populated town in Alberta and acquires 90 acres of land with his wealthy parents’ money. He takes to calling himself rancher, but he spends most of his time doing very non-rancherly things like playing golf and polo, and having tea and scones. The film uses an interesting style of animation that often looks like it’s comprised of oil paintings progressing at just a few frames per second, and while it has a more overt narrative than the previous two, there’s not a lot of depth to that story.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (USA) — In this tale of The Wizard of Oz meets Pleasantville meets Night at the Museum, a man who is sitting on his front porch reading is suddenly whisked up by a great wind and deposited in a black-and-white world inhabited. He happens upon a library and he soon finds himself to be its caretaker. The books are alive, dancing and flying and otherwise serving as his companion, and he soon finds that as people encounter and read the books, they turn from black and white into color. It’s well drawn and packs a lot into a fairly short period of time, but is pretty lacking in originality.

La Luna (USA) — This Pixar short features three people in a rowboat named “La Luna”: a boy and two men who we presume to be his father and grandfather. They’ve rowed out on a dark night but before long, the moon has risen into the sky. The father holds a ladder while the boy climbs up with a rope and steps onto the surface of the moon, anchoring the boat to it. We find the surface littered with lots of little shooting stars that have fallen to the moon, and it becomes clear that the men are there in a janitorial capacity. As expected, the animation is of a very high quality and the story is fairly touching, but I didn’t find it as immediately and intensely compelling as many of their other shorts.

I’m not entirely clear on the rules for Academy Award nominations, but I really don’t like that so many of the films which are nominated haven’t even had a real theatrical run in any city but New York or Los Angeles. That’s especially true with foreign film nominees, and this year was no exception. Bullhead was the only nominee I’d gotten to see before the nominations were announced, and that was because I got to see it at the Fantastic Fest film festival. A Separation seemed to be the front-runner in this category, so I was glad to have the opportunity to see it before the awards were actually announced.

The film opens with Simin hoping to convince a judge to allow her to divorce her husband Nader so that she can take their daughter Termeh out of the country to somewhere with less violence and more freedom. It seems that in Iran, a couple is only allowed to get divorced if both parties agree on all the terms, and Nader isn’t being as cooperative as Simin would like. He can’t go with them because he needs to stay and take care of his elderly father (who has been stricken with Alzheimer’s Disease), and while he’s willing to let his wife go, he doesn’t want her to take Termeh.

Simin may not be allowed to legally divorce Nader, but she doesn’t have to keep living with him. She goes to live with her mother, leaving no one to take care of his father during the day while Nader is at work. Nader hires Razieh to fill this role, but one day comes home to find her gone and his father lying on the floor with one arm tied to his bed. Upset about the way his father was treated, and believing that Razieh may have stolen money in addition to shirking her duties, Nader becomes perhaps a little too aggressive in his anger, and shortly thereafter he finds himself charged with a fairly serious crime.

First, it’s important to say that the hype is true, and that A Separation is an excellent film. It does get a little complex at times, with many people involved in the investigation and making contradictory claims, but it’s not all that difficult to keep things straight or to follow the film’s progress as additional information is revealed.

However, I was also surprised to find that it did not meet my expectations in one key area: that of the rules of Iranian society. I had expected it to have much more of a misogynistic, women-as-property feel to it, but it was instead quite democratic and even-handed in this regard. It’s possible that the film was censored by the Iranian government to portray their country in a more positive light, but it’s also possible that western propaganda has succeeded in convincing us that things are very different than they actually are. Religion does play a more significant role in the film than misogyny, but even there it’s done in a way that could have played out in a nearly identical manner if the story had been set in the United States instead of Iran.

That A Separation differs significantly in what I expected is slightly off-putting, but it also does make the film more relatable. Its Oscar nomination is completely deserved, but of the two I’ve seen in its category, I do think that Bullhead is the better film.

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.