Sorry, Noah, this Eighties' bore fest doesn't work

More from the 51st edition of Montreal's Festival du nouveau cinéma, which wrapped up Sunday: 

Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale) is one of my fave contemporary directors, perfect for capturing a certain Bourgeois Bohemian zeitgeist. So it was disappointing to see him pull a boner with his filming of Don DeLillo's novel White Noise. Set in the 1980's (though it looks like the 1970's) the movie is a satire on the American Dream. An unlikely bumbled-headed professor (Adam Driver) and his serene wife (Greta Gerwig) evacuate the family when an emergency grips their small Ohio town (the home of Oberlin College). Mom and dad are the incompetents while the kids take charge. But this film is a more than two-hour snooze fest. What about this plot makes you want to care? And all the trouble Baumbach went through to stage the Eighties and this mass evacuation...it makes me exhausted just thinking about it. The best scene, really, is the closing credits.....Hong Sang-soo's The Novelist's Film, from South Korea, is a quirky little picture that at once is absorbing as it makes you wonder what the point of it is. An aging novelist, Jun-hee (Lee Hye-young) has a series of chance encounters - really chance - during an afternoon walk. The most interesting, and entertaining aspects, of these is the subtle differences of misunderstandings or opinion that lead to larger questions about the way we live and what's important in life. One of her encounters, with an equally famous actress, finds the actress not currently performing. Another character calls that's a "waste."  But, pipes-up Jun-hee, "What is she wasting exactly?".....It's like they don’t make movies like this anymore. France's Quentin Dupieux's Smoking Causes Coughing is an absurd comedy that looks like a cross between old time TV sitcoms and comic books. The Tobacco Force is a group of avengers, in their blue latex suits, who nonchalantly fight monsters by spraying them with the chemicals found in cigarettes. Of course, they also take cigarette smoke breaks. On their breaks, they tell bizarre tales of intrigue and murder. Meanwhile their chief, with all the authority of a Foreign Legion commander, has a reptilian head and broadcasts from his bed alongside bored sex partners.....Finally, the festival has brought a retrospective of US director Walter Hill’s films. And on the final night it screened his The Warriors from 1979, a cult classic. This story of combating gangs over the course of a long New York night has the Coney Island Warriors targeted by all the others as they try to make their way from the Bronx back to Brooklyn, as daunting as crossing the Atlantic. Deborah Van Valkenburgh (TV's Too Close for Comfort) also stars as The Warriors’ hanger-on, Mercy. The whole thing's a fun romp filmed at a real time of New York City's graffiti-ridden subway cars nadir.