One of the things I have been doing a lot the past few days, since Tuesday, is watching a lot of movies. Two in particular stand out in my mind. Neither of them will leave you with a smile on your face, I'll tell you that right up front, but as works of art they are admirable.

The first is "The Dreamlife of Angels", Here is a snippet of Anthony Lane's review in The New Yorker. (Try to find the full review; reading it in a collection of Lane's movie reviews is what inspired me to watch the movie).

Erick Zonca's first feature is set in Lille, in northern France; it is tempting to read the whole movie as a rebuke to sunlit romances on the Côte d'Azur. The heroines are Isa (Elodie Bouchez), a free spirit who moseys around France with a rucksack, and Marie (Natasha Régnier), whom she meets in a clothing factory, and who offers her a place to stay. In a sense, the film is little more than the brief history of their friendship; what fires it up, and takes it to the brink of greatness, is not only that Zonca registers every tremor of their competing emotions-the smiling blitheness of Isa, the inward fury of the beautiful Marie-but that the story travels so far. The film begins with a scuffed, documentary air that gradually deepens, almost without your noticing, into more serene moments of epiphany; the transition is beautifully handled by Bouchez and Régnier, who-quite rightly-shared the prize for Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival last year.

The other is "4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days". Here is the summary from Amazon:

There was a loud outcry when Romania's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days failed to garner a 2008 Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, and it could certainly be argued that this extraordinary movie was unfairly overlooked. At the very least, had it been nominated, it would have offered a stark contrast to Best Picture contender Juno. Whereas the latter is a funny, touching tale of a teenage girl who decides to find more suitable parents for her soon-to-be-born child, 4 Months is a decidedly bleak look at a time and place when one of the two alternatives to adoption (i.e., keeping the child) is beyond consideration and the other is an illegal, highly dangerous last resort. It takes a while for the viewer to realize that abortion is the subject of director Cristian Mungiu's film; for the first 40 minutes or so, all we know is that Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), college roommates in a country still controlled by the Ceausescu dictatorship, are up to something they'd prefer to keep secret. Gabita, it develops, is pregnant. She is also an innocent, scared screw-up who's unable to handle any of the necessary details involved in solving her problem, which obliges the far more capable Otilia to take care of everything from booking the hotel and meeting the abortionist to buying black market cigarettes for the pair. What follows is anything but cute, clever, or romantic. Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov), the abortionist, is a straightforward but frightening character who demands more than money for his services. Meanwhile, Adi, Otilia's boyfriend, is a decent but essentially clueless fellow who insists that she attend his mother's birthday party on the very day that the two girls have checked into the hotel where Gabita's procedure takes place; the two scenes in which we meet Bebe and Adi's parents, reveal Mongiu's mastery of his medium and are at once intense, discomfiting, and completely riveting. And if Oscar voters missed the boat, many other didn't: among numerous other plaudits for the film was the '07 Palme d'Or at Cannes. --Sam Graham

Maybe I was just in the right frame of mind to accept a certain degree of grimness but I really enjoyed watching both of them. To me any movie (or book, TV show, or play, for that matter) succeeds or fails based on the answers to a few questions. Is it an interesting story? Do you care about the characters? Does it take you to a world utterly different from your own and make you want to stay there till the end?

Both highly recommended, with the caveat in the thread title. Even if this isn't your cup of tea at the moment, file them away as a movie Post-It for some other time.

Now I am going to go turn on the DVR and catch up with something I suspect will be even grimmer: Wisconsin vs. Florida State, LOL.