Days of Heaven
A good movie to watch if you recently enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire. It has more of those dreamy sunset scenes and hand-held panoramas of trains going off into the distance. But frankly, what Terence Malik achieves here–Days of Heaven, in 1978, was the first movie shot entirely with natural light–is visually light-years ahead of Slumdog. Only instead of an uplifting story about overcoming poverty in the slums, in this movie the economic and emotional misery seem inescapable. The acting is taut with brooding and tension. The script is spare, but each word is explosive. For connoisseurs of serious drama, in every sense of the word serious. Otherwise your heartstrings won’t be able to handle it.

Les Chansons D’Amour (Love Songs) (Trailer)
French film makers have a way of infusing effortless coolness into anything they touch. Especially if it’s sex, poetry, or pop music. In this musical by Christophe Honoré, there is all three, and even if most of what is poetic has been mangled out of recognition by the inexplicably inaccurate subtitles, you can tell from looking at the actors that they are, in fact, saying something incredibly sexy. Never mind that he’s asking you to “Keep your saliva as an antidote/Let it trickle like sweet venom down my throat.” The plot isn’t exactly airtight, and the script has no pretensions of making any deep or complex statements on life. But this is a good thing. This movie, slightly incoherent and sincerely, painfully romantic, just exists for the sake of it, or as a character intones about love, “pour la beauté du geste.”

Waltz With Bashir (Trailer)
There is often a paradox in movies where the director’s aim, as he states at the beginning of this film, is to uncover the truth behind wartime atrocities. There is closure once such a truth is known, but it might leave the protagonist with an even deeper moral burden than what he started with. This animated documentary–the first of its kind to reach such a wide audience–is not a naive attempt to celebrate heroism in war, or even to reclaim some element of humanity out of violence and horror. Instead, the director, whose personal memories and morality are at stake in the story he tells, almost seems to aestheticize the violence itself. The scenes of war are drawn with energy and accompanied by dramatic music, but their most thought-provoking quality is, simply put, that the actions depicted are insane, and fundamentally unexplainable. A beautiful, immersive, and exhausting movie to watch.