The Imposter - a documentary about Frederic Bourdin, a French conman and serial impersonator who contacts the families of missing teenagers and pretends to be them. A very interesting flick. It's well-made and compelling, interspersing dramatized footage with actual interviews. The 90-minute run-time flew by.
The Place Beyond The Pines - An inter-generational of fathers and sons, and how certain actions can haunt a bloodline. This is essentially three movies in one. The film begins with Ryan Gosling's character, a stunt motorcycle driver in a traveling carnival who leaves his job after learning a local girl gave birth to his son the previous year and decides to find a way to provide for his new family. Then the focus shift's to Bradley Cooper's character, a high-minded rookie patrol officer who returns to work after being shot on the job, only to find that corruption in the department has become the norm. The final segment ties the two previous stories together. I really liked A Place Beyond the Pines. The narrative is very unique, the camerawork is wonderful, and the characters have an impressive amount of depth (aided by some fantastic performances). This movie is made by the same guy who directed Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance).
Marketa Lazarová - An epic tale set in medieval Czechoslovakia about two rival families of robber barons who run afoul of the King.
The Hulu+ description called this movie "The Greatest Czech film of all time", but since I've never seen another Czech film besides The Cremator (which was pretty darn good) I wasn't really sure if that was high praise or not. Needless to say I was intrigued, but I don't think I was quite prepared for the 3-hour roller coaster ride that is Marketa Lazarova. Actually, calling it a roller coaster isn't very accurate as it's more like Disney's Haunted Mansion ride - the film has a certain hallucinatory or dream-like feel to it, as if every character and every setting is an illusion.
The narrative is linear for the most part, and scenes are divided with inter-titles which describe the events to follow, but the story jumps around a lot and the viewer is forced to make certain inferences about the events that preceded (it's a bit like Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Andrei Rublev' in that sense). The directors use of ellipsis in this movie can be disorientating (which adds to that dreamlike feel), but it never seems to intrude on the narrative and in fact it accentuates the impact of the following scenes. The film starts by thrusting you into the story with absolutely zero background information - it's only after most of the characters have been introduced that their relationships can be understood. I'm not ashamed to say I had to turn to Wikipedia to clear up my initial confusions about the plot and characters, which helped me gain a foothold in the narrative and made the rest of the film much easier to understand. Once I had my foothold I found myself completely absorbed in the film.
The camerawork is...just...unbelievable, really. The cinematographer makes full use of the wide-screen format and manages to compose some of the most brilliantly stark and beautiful images that I've ever seen in a film. Each shot feels meticulously crafted and unique, utilizing an impressive array of tracking shots, long shots, high and low angles, tilted perspectives, point-of-view shots, and a number of techniques that I have never seen before. Visually speaking, there are very few films as expertly crafted as this. "Stunning" is a good word for it as I often found myself staring slack-jawed at the camera technique. Here are some examples of what I mean, though they are a poor representation without movement (also I couldn't find stills of my favorite shots):
I really want to write more about it but I have some other less-interesting stuff to do now, so I guess I'll leave it here by saying Marketa Lazarova is not only (probably) the best Czech film of all time, but one of the most brilliant examples of cinema that I have ever seen.
Hey come on now it's not like Im a huge fan or something. 
