Couple of movies I saw recently and really liked:
The Secret of Kells -- An animated feature from Ireland (with a lot of European partners involved) set in Ireland during the Dark Ages, featuring a young boy from a fortified monastery and a forest spirit in the form of a shapeshifting girl. The storyline is pretty good (although the ending is somewhat abrupt), but the artwork...oh god, it's *gorgeous*. There's something about the style of the art and animation that makes me think of Samurai Jack, especially the fondness for a single moving figure against a lush, richly detailed background. Good voice acting, and enchanting soundtrack, made to be a mix of monastic music and Irish traditional music.
The Good, The Bad and the Weird -- Whacked-out Korean mash-up of Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Only this time, set in 1930's Manchuria. You have a principled bounty hunter (The Good), a ruthless, psychotic assassin (The Bad) and a petty thief who somehow always seems to squeak out of the tightest scrapes (The Weird). The Bad is sent to kill a Japanese official on a train and steal back a treasure map, reputed to lead to a cache of riches hidden at the end of the Qing Dynasty. The Weird is already robbing the train and winds up with the map. The Bad starts chasing the Weird, and the Good is chasing the Bad *and* the Weird. Also chasing after the map are a band of Manchurian bandits and (eventually) a large portion of the Japanese Army in Manchuria. This leads to an epic chase scene in the high desert where everybody's chasing the map and trying to kill each other at the same time.
The movie is chock-full of anachronisms and assorted oddities (1930's bandits armed with everything from a battleaxe to an assault rifle), loads of shootouts and Beyond The Impossible coolness (such as The Good swinging above town on a rope, accurately using a long rifle to pick off bad guys), and quite a few moments of comedy (mostly where The Weird is involved). And of course, because this is an homage to the Leone original, it all culminates in a Mexican standoff between the titular characters.
This movie singlehandedly piqued my interest in modern Korean cinema. This was just a flat-out FUN movie. Like early Tarantino, without the ego.