Hi Gems
I saw The Parallax View for the first time about a year ago, and loved it - a great slice of 1970's American paranoia cinema, I thought it was as good as The Conversation.
Palm Springs looks good - I might give that a shot.
Some notable things I've watched over the past few months:
The Bad Kids - I don't usually go for streaming series due to a lack of patience, but this came highly recommended and was only 12 episodes, so I gave it a shot - it was brilliant thriller. A top student teams up with two homeless kids to blackmail the maths teacher, after they accidently film him killing his parents-in-law. A cat-and-mouse game begins, and carnage follows.
Mr Reliable (aka My Entire Life) is loosely based on true story of a siege in Sydney in the late 1960's, in which a gunman barricaded himself in a house and demanded, among other things, that the Police Commissioner be his best man at his wedding. It came out a few months before The Castle, has a similar theme, and I think is much funnier. But it bombed at the box office. Go figure.
The Italian Job - not what I expected at all. At least now I understand all those "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off" references in those Steve Coogan/Rob Bryden Trip movies.
We Are Little Zombies - 4 recently orphaned Japanese kids meet at their parents' funerals, and are united by the fact that none are able to express or feel any grief for their loss. So they start a band. The whole film is structured like some kind of psychedelic early-generation nintendo game.
Blue Collar - great little 1978 crime film with Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel as workers in a Detroit auto plant, who set out to rob their local branch of the union.
Ermo - 1994 Chinese film about a woman who sets out to own the bigger TV than her wealthy neighbour. Often very funny, but also bittersweet as lessons are learnt about how relationships are more important than possessions.
