cf09/1243017150-nurse_fighter_boy_07-.jpgHere we are! Day one. Ready?

We have two DON'T MISS movies today. I have seen neither of them, but both are recommended by humans of impeccable taste.

Of Nurse.Fighter.Boy (7 pm, Harvard Exit), Jen Graves says:

This Canadian movie about a sick Jamaican woman (nurse), her 12-year-old son (boy), and their friend Silence (fighter: a boxer, played by Clark Johnson, the awesome Baltimore Sun city editor from The Wire), moves at a lazy, seductive pace that makes you want it never to end. Long, slow shots of flesh are accompanied by extended songs; the entire soundtrack is a gem. The light is hazy, thick, and colored, and the bodies in the ring smack against each other so palpably that you feel close by, like you're haunting them. The happyish ending is less important than the lush world set up by these three characters.

And Jon Frosch reviews Summer Hours (4:30 pm, SIFF Cinema):

This French film seems slight at first: three adult siblings (Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche, and Jérémie Rénier), two of whom live abroad, must decide what to do with their recently deceased mother’s country home and art collection. But Olivier Assayas (Demonlover, Boarding Gate), a restless, intelligent filmmaker, opens up the story to larger implications, producing a lovely, meditative examination of globalization’s impact on family and culture. The rigorously naturalistic filmmaking turns ponderous at times, but the movie is infused with the sadness—and inevitability—of passing time and changing ways.

There's a buttload of other films worth checking out too: The Higher Force (Icelandic mob movie); I Sell the Dead (grave robbers + vampires + Dominic Monaghan); Eldorado ("The movie has a pleasing sadness," says Charles Mudede); Stella (Brendan Kiley: "about the strange, episodic experience of children who are in the world but not of it"); Snow (ethnic cleansing and jam-making in a Bosnian village); Terribly Happy (Dan Savage calls it, "a Danish Blood Simple with uglier wallpaper, moldier ceilings, and a bog standing in for a corn field"); and The Yes Men Fix the World (a documentary about "the world's most ambitious pranksters").

Personally, I'll probably try for Stella, Nurse.Fighter.Boy, or Yes Men.

Sorry I said "buttload."