Not been many round ups or posts in general, because this period of the year (The French Open up to Wimbledon) takes up so much of my time with non-film interests, and the summer is usually a down point for cinema. So having watched Daniela Hantuchova have her best result in a year and half, the best French Open in recent memory and the worst Wimbledon, I'll get a few things out of the way to wipe the slate clean before I start seeing more stuff now the bulk of the tennis is over (and I love that I have a window open with a livestream from a first round match of a clay tournament in Hungary as I'm typing this 
).
Right, the filler paragraph is done, on with the films. For some inexplicable reason one of my art cinemas showed a couple of episodes of Kieslowski's legendary Dekalog, and one of them was one of my favourites, Honour Thy Father and Mother (Episode 4). It was accompanied by an atrocious short called Till It Hurts, which is based on the same principle but is just a bloke arguing with his mother for 20 minutes. I actually can't believe the cinema got away with showing the episode though because 1 minute in the projection stopped, then after it had been fixed the sound was absolutely atrocious, distorting when the score/voices got over a certain volume. That such an appalling presentation could almost derail one of the most perfect hours of television is almost impressive. Powerful, emotional, strange, beautiful, it shines through in any environment.
Moving on from that I caught An Unfinished Life when it was on tv. Initially this was a film that people thought might have a chance at oscars, being a Lasse Hallström film. However, its released got pushed back a year and that is never a good sign (The Other Boleyn Girl suffered the same fate last year, as has The Road this year). It's all very watchable, Robert Redford will never lose his effortlessly natural screen presence and he, Morgan Freeman and a young Becca Gardner all do very well. Jennifer Lopez is just there and doesn't do badly but equally she's not very convincing. Not a surprise this got very mixed reviews at the time and also not a surprise it bombed at the box office. It's a decent watch, I enjoyed it as far as it went but it's very inconsequential.
I also tried to watch A Fine Madness, because I thought the idea of any Joanne Woodward film sounded like a good idea, let alone one with Sean Connery. I ended up switching it off, horrendously dated, not funny and just going for the kookiness and falling flat on its face, would never have believed Mrs. Newman could ever be so fundamentally uninteresting. Lastly I saw Mad City because its being doing the rounds a lot but once I found out Costa Gavras directed it I finally checked it out. Interesting for long stretches, kind of Dog Day Afternoon meets Network, but it gets a bit too obvious in its message the longer it goes. Dustin Hoffman's very fine, Travolta is just John Travolta "acting", this could have been excellent, but instead it's just pretty good.