Be sure not to miss this opportunity to see Routine Pleasures by French Filmmaker Pierre Gorin. Routine Pleasures is a strange and dear portrait of art, enthusiasm and an obsession for things. There are actually 4 subjects: the French filmmaker Pierre Gorin who makes his presence and musings quite known, Manny Farber; a celebrated film writer and completely true-to-self painter (born and raised in Douglas Arizona), a group of model train enthusiasts, and the place itself, Southern California, USA in 1986

What do a club devoted to model trains and the legendary film critic and painter Manny Farber have in common? These two lines intersect in Jean-Pierre Gorin’s lovely and distinctly American film, which takes as its subject the desire to re-create the past (the locomotive aficionados’ elaborate worlds in miniature, Farber’s teeming canvases) and expands to something richly philosophical and surprisingly funny.

Routine Pleasures is a masterful meditation on America’s landscapes, real and imagined.

-Criterion