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Staff & contributors

, 2001

Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman star in this brilliant small-scale drama by Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before trilogy). Hawke plays Vince, a volatile drug dealer who rekindles with his high school friend, Jon (Robert Sean Leonard).

And that’s it: there are only three characters in this movie, and it’s all set within a Michigan motel room.

But boy is it tense in that room, and man is this film so brilliantly written and well-acted. Vince, Jon, and Amy (Thurman’s character) discuss an event 10 years prior involving rape.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Ethan Hawke, Robert Sean Leonard, Uma Thurman

Director: Richard Linklater

It’s difficult to try to capture the truth of who a person really is, especially when there’s already preconceived notions or previous depictions about said person. Released a year after Capote (2005), Infamous inevitably drew comparisons to the biopic, especially with the stark difference between their tones. It starts off with a more gossipy, idle tone, introducing novelist Truman Capote first through documentary-like interviews, just before Toby Jones as Capote charms his way through droll chatter about some famous people. It seems much more vapid than Philip Seymour Hoffman’s depiction, but much more warm too, making Capote’s tendencies to gab and tell other people’s stories, in part due to fame, but also due to a certain joie de vivre of storytelling, once that inevitably breaks him when he finds the story of what his life could have been. Infamous might not be as acclaimed as its preceding Capote depiction, nor is it more truthful, but it’s certainly a fascinating portrayal of a fascinating man.

Genre: Crime, Drama

Actor: Brady Coleman, Brady Hender, Brent A. McCoy, Brett Brock, Brian Shoop, Daniel Craig, Dennis Letts, Gabriel Folse, Gail Cronauer, Grant James, Gwyneth Paltrow, Hope Davis, Isabella Rossellini, Jeff Daniels, Joey Basham, John Benjamin Hickey, Juliet Stevenson, Lee Pace, Lee Ritchey, Leticia Trejo, Libby Villari, Marco Perella, Michael Panes, Mitch Baker, Norman Bennett, Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Andrew Jones, Richard Dillard, Sandra Bullock, Sheila Bailey, Sigourney Weaver, Toby Jones, Turk Pipkin

Director: Douglas McGrath

Rating: R

Waking Life is composed exclusively of a series of conversations involving the main character, with him sometimes participating and sometimes just as a spectator. The discussions revolve around issues such as metaphysics, free will, social philosophy or the meaning of life. The title refers to a quote from Jorge Santayana: "sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.", and the whole movie wanders around the state of a lucid dream, emphasized by the rotoscoping technique in which it was filmed. Waking Life is not just a movie worth watching, it is a movie worth watching a thousand times, because you will always notice something that you have previously missed out.

Genre: Animation, Drama, Fantasy

Actor: Adam Goldberg, Alex Jones, Bill Wise, Caveh Zahedi, Charles Gunning, Ethan Hawke, Glover Gill, Jason Liebrecht, Jeanine Attaway, John Christensen, Julie Delpy, Kelly Rebecca Nichols, Kim Krizan, Lorelei Linklater, Louis Black, Mona Lee Fultz, Nicky Katt, Peter Atherton, Richard Linklater, Steve Brudniak, Steve Fitch, Steven Prince, Steven Soderbergh, Timothy "Speed" Levitch, Trevor Jack Brooks, Wiley Wiggins

Director: Richard Linklater

Rating: R