El Hombre Invisible (DrBenway)

Don't see this expecting something in the vein of The Exorcist. There aren't any spinning heads or projectile vomiting and no sign of the demon Pazuzu here. Instead, Requiem is a non-sensationalized, non-judgmental look at what happens when mental illness clashes with religion. Based on the same case that inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but the two films are different. Emily Rose focused primarily on a lawyer involved in a court case involving the Priest who performed the exorcism, while Requiem focuses on the woman and is a drama about what can lead someone to believe they are possessed.

The topic of exorcism may be easy "go to" material for horror films, but Requiem is not a horror film and the director doesn't decide for us whether or not she is possessed, but instead lets us draw our own conclusions. Lead actress Sandra Huller is really great throughout the film and the handheld camerawork is a nice touch in making the viewer feel as if they are in the room alongside her family.

Second film begins with Argentine-born revolutionary Che Guevara having left Cuba on an ill-fated campaign in disguise, eventually smuggling himself over the Bolivian border, leaving behind a second wife and 5 children. Throughout, there is never any mention of what would happen to them, how they feel, or how he even feels about all this. Still, Steven Soderbergh seems a lot milder and more sentimental as a director with a slower pace. Although I knew the outcome, Soderbergh does his best in showing how frustrating the fight in Bolivia might have been with a fading echo of what was possible in Cuba.

I would've like some of Che's failed campaign in the Congo to have been showcased, but I'll take what I can get. Regardless of how you feel about it politically, Soderbergh makes nice use of dilemmas that characters are confronted with. In real life, these were moments in the struggle where people made important decisions based on ideas of strength and weakness.

Jeff Bridges is The Dude, and it's hard to imagine anyone in the role. Someone else would've come off as just a pot-smoking hippie with some funny lines. Roger Deakins, the cinematographer, is a craftsman of unsurpassed skill and an artist with an amazing capacity to transform the mundane (like um, bowling) into something truly beautiful to behold. The plot is an afterthought and is more about the journey than the destination.

Even if you don't know what it all means, even if it's ultimately puzzling and unexplainable, there is a feeling, an emotional response that persists. There is a strange logic to this film. A logic of death, of evolution, of birth. This is the strangest kind of logic that must be felt and seen, instead of pondered.