Miraculum is one of those movies that knits together different stories and hopes to make a beautiful afghan but sometimes ends up making a bit of a mess. Let’s face it, it’s hard to find, say, four different stories that are equally compelling, and in this case, Gabriel Sabourin does a better job with some stories (as screenwriter) than with the one he tells himself as an actor.The city of Montreal has just been home to a terrible plane crash where the lone survivor remains unidentified. Julie (Marilyn Castonguay) a nurse and also a Jehovah’s Witness, becomes quite taken with this unidentified stranger, maybe as a placeholder for her complicated feelings toward her boyfriend (Xavier Dolan), also a Witness, who is dying from leukemia and unwilling to get the treatment that would save his life, as per their religious doctrine.

The Burbs is not one of Tom Hanks’ best, but when he teams up with Bruce Dern as two suburbanites with maybe a little too much time on their hands, it’s still pretty awesome. A new family has moved into the neighbourhood and get this – they don’t mow their lawn! And their garbage cans are suspicious! And…do they look a little…foreign to you? Paranoia starts to creep in and suddenly the neighbourhood dads are crossing some pretty serious boundaries to accuse their little-known neighbourhoods of all kinds of mayhem, including murder. Coincidentally, this “neighbourhood” was shot on the Universal backlot, which we’ll be visiting in the next few weeks – it’s the same neighbourhood that was used for Desperate Housewives and Leave It To Beaver.

Words and Pictures has got both Juliette Binoche and Clive Owen, so already I’m sold. They’re both playing high school teachers – she, art (being a talented artist herself, but recently plagued by arthritis) and he, English (being himself a writer, currently stifled by his alcoholism). They’re both a little isolated and angry at home, but shine in their respective classrooms and soon have their students engaged in a “war” – words vs pictures, or is a picture really worth a thousand words? It’s witty and interesting and while not their best work it was a surprising and gratifying Netflix find on a quiet night and I enjoyed it.

I bet nobody like the movie Blackhat, ever.  Am I right? The “action” was silly. The “romance” was even sillier. The “thriller” aspect was completely inert. I can’t write anything about this movie without using ironic quotations, for goat cheese’s sake! They bust hacker-Thor from prison to help stop an even evil-er hacker and it’s all cyber-crimey and pretty dull, with really loose writing and lazy directing, and you just want it to be over, but why spend TWO HOURS AND FIFTEEN MINUTES anticipating credits when you could just not watch it at all?