Movies Released April 6, 2012

After getting turned down by a photography agency, Thom finds his landlord throwing all of his belongings out into the hallway. With no job prospects and no place to sleep, Thom must turn to his recurring last resort: driving his illegal taxicab around the streets of New York. Fortunately for him, Claire Barrow isn't having a good day, either. First she comes home to find her husband flirting with his new secretary, then discovers her estranged father has suffered a heart attack in California. In a frenzy, Claire runs out into the night and hails what she assumes to be a cab. What she gets instead is Thom. With her life in ruins, Claire decides on a whim to pay Thom to drive her out to California. With nothing in New York to call his own, Thom reluctantly agrees.

The movie revolves around a group of style-obsessed college girls who take in a new student (Gerwig) and teach her their misguided ways of helping people at their grungy university. The crux of the story is focused on the relationship between Gerwig's character and a suitor (Brody), whom the girls are taken with but have doubts over his intentions.

After a long absence, gangster and father Ulysses Pick (Jason Patric) arrives home to a house haunted with memories, towing the body of a teenaged girl and a bound and gagged young man. His gang waits inside his house, having shot their way past police. There is friction in the ranks. Ulysses, however, is focused on one thing: journeying through the house, room by room, and reaching his wife Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini) in her bedroom upstairs. The equilibrium of the house has been disturbed and his odyssey eventually becomes an emotional tour, as the ghostly nooks and crannies of the house reveal more about the mysterious Pick family.

In this world of wonders there are still places that have not been smoothed over with the shallow surfaces of Western commercialism. This film is a personal Valentine to a life filled with amazing, exotic, beautiful and fearsome places for the world. The amazing thing is not just the visual demonstration of how fleeting life is, but a meditation on how the decisions that seem momentous on our time scale are flickering snapshots of life on this planet, too small to be observed by most. Somehow the music combined with technology becomes a personal experience that makes the earth and its inhabitants seem touchingly fragile and full of wonder.