Our Winter Film Fest

The winter months are the perfect time to catch up on all the movies we missed last year due to the Oscar rush, the cold weather and the lack of any good new releases. Since my last post about movies, we've managed to watch seven. Here's the list:

Over the Hedge
An above average animated flick - William Shatner and Steve Carell steal the show - and the commonalities with Hoodwinked are uncanny (zany squirrels and Ben Folds for starters).

Cars
Fantastic animation and a pretty good story line, yet it failed to have as much memorable dialogue as past Pixar movies (we quote a lot of Nemo and Incredibles around our house).

United 93
This film may be the best drama we've seen in a long while. It is inspiring without being sentimental. During the final ten minutes, I was sitting at the edge of my seat hoping beyond reason that the passengers would "win" in the end. And in one sense, they did.

X-Men: The Last Stand
This "final" installment in the X-men franchise is fun, but doesn't live up to the quality of the first two. It ultimately suffered from too many plot lines.

Little Miss Sunshine
This is the "buzz movie" of 2006, I can only echo the praise this little indie film has already received. Great acting, great soundtrack, great story, and great laughs. The deleted scenes on the dvd are a must see.

World Trade Center
The second 9/11 film isn't quite as good as United 93 even though it is more hopeful in tone. The story though is captivating and miraculous. Oliver Stone surprised me with a film that strikes just the right tone at the five-year anniversary.

Inside Man
This is just an okay heist flick. Not quite up to par with Ocean's 11 or the Italian Job, but still pretty good.

My revised must see list includes: Flags of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima, Sophie Scholl, Casino Royale, Wordplay, Marie Antoinette, The Pursuit of Happyness, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Stranger Than Fiction, Fast Food Nation, Thank You for Smoking, A Prairie Home Companion, Nacho Libre, and The Queen. Somehow I don't think winter is going to last long enough to see all these (at least I hope it doesn't).