It’s 12:30 am and I’m pretty much whipped. Up and rolling since 6 am, and I’ll be hitting Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes‘ The Unknown Girl tomorrow at 8:30 am. Today I saw three films — Pedro Almodovar‘s Julieta (exquisitely composed and well acted but mainly an anguished Joan Crawford mother-daughter hairshirt film), Kleber Mendoca Filhos‘ Aquarius (a rooted, well-honed Brazilian drama about time, aging, survival, dignity and cultural changes with Sonia Braga playing a tough matriarch) and finally David MacKenzie‘s Hell or High Water, which at first glance I was a little afraid of as it seemed B-movieish. It turned out to be not just a tight and forceful bank robbers-vs.-cops drama, but a wry and eloquent one also. It has guns and loot and getaway cars, but the real subject is the tapped-out hinterland economy and how it all seems to be about despair and downhill attitudes out there in shitkicker country. The wise, sometimes funny and sometimes solemn screenplay, written by Taylor Sheridan (Sicario), is the saving grace. Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine and Ben Foster (who’s looking a lot beefier than he did five or six years ago) costar.