From the Movie Snob:

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. (B+) Although this movie got a lot of good reviews, it was never high on my list of priorities. I finally saw it this weekend at the instigation of a friend of mine who’s a former Navy doctor, and I was duly impressed. It’s a straight-ahead tale about swashbuckling in the service of king and country, with no post-modern apologies for Eurocentrism or colonialism or anything else. Russell Crowe’s Captain “Lucky Jack” Aubrey reminded me of a certain James T. Kirk -- an imaginative commander who’s not afraid to act on his own initiative when his orders run out. Only the proto-Darwinian musings of the ship’s doctor seem a bit out of place, but this is a minor quibble with an exciting and well-made adventure film. Maybe this is really more of an A-.

The Barbarian Invasions. (B+) This is a Canadian movie mostly in French. Remy is a 60ish college professor who is dying of cancer, and his son Sebastien is a successful businessman. The two are estranged, apparently because Remy’s philandering ways destroyed his marriage and because Sebastien’s pragmatic capitalism is an embarrassment to Remy’s conventional academic-style liberalism. Nevertheless, Sebastien answers his mother’s call to be with his father in his last weeks, and that is pretty much where the movie begins. To my surprise, the director does not assume that Remy’s perspective is self-evidently superior. For example, the Canadian health-care system is portrayed as a bureaucratic nightmare; even more surprising, a member of Remy’s cohort of friends is even open-minded enough to argue the intellectual greatness of the Founding Fathers of the United States. Although the Catholic Church comes in for a bit of abuse, even that is somewhat counterbalanced by a warmly compassionate nun who works in the hospital. A thought-provoking film about a universal subject.