Films Shown in 2008
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN - Rated R - 123 minutes - Scope
The movie opens with the flat, confiding voice of Tommy Lee Jones. He describes a teenage killer he once sent to the chair. The boy had killed his 14-year-old girlfriend. The papers described it as a crime of passion, "but he tolt me there weren't nothin' passionate about it. Said he'd been fixin' to kill someone for as long as he could remember. Said if I let him out of there, he'd kill somebody again. Said he was goin' to hell. Reckoned he'd be there in about 15 minutes." These words sounded verbatim to me from No Country for Old Men, the novel by Cormac McCarthy, but I find they are not quite. And their impact has been improved upon in the delivery. When I get the DVD of this film, I will listen to that stretch of narration several times; Jones delivers it with a vocal precision and contained emotion that is extraordinary, and it sets up the entire film, which regards a completely evil man with wonderment, as if astonished that that such a merciless creature could exist. The man is named Anton Chigurh. No, I don't know how his last name is pronounced. Like many of the words McCarthy uses, particularly in his masterpiece Suttree, I think it is employed like an architectural detail: The point is not how it sounds or what it means, but the brushstroke it adds to the sentence. Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is a tall, slouching man with lank, black hair and a terrifying smile, who travels through Texas carrying a tank of compressed air and killing people with a cattle stungun. It propels a cylinder into their heads and whips it back again. Chigurh is one strand in the twisted plot. Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff played by Jones, is another. The third major player is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a poor man who lives with his wife in a house trailer, and one day, while hunting, comes across a drug deal gone wrong in the desert. Vehicles range in a circle like an old wagon train. Almost everyone on the scene is dead. They even shot the dog. In the back of one pickup are neatly stacked bags of drugs. Llewelyn realizes one thing is missing: the money. He finds it in a briefcase next to a man who made it as far as a shade tree before dying. The plot will involve Moss attempting to make this $2 million his own, Chigurh trying to take it away from him and Sheriff Bell trying to interrupt Chigurh's ruthless murder trail. We will also meet Moss' childlike wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald); a cocky bounty hunter named Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson); the businessman (Stephen Root) who hires Carson to track the money after investing in the drug deal, and a series of hotel and store clerks who are unlucky enough to meet Chigurh. "No Country for Old Men" is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made "Fargo." It involves elements of the thriller and the chase but is essentially a character study, an examination of how its people meet and deal with a man so bad, cruel and unfeeling that there is simply no comprehending him. Chigurh is so evil, he is almost funny sometimes. "He has his principles," says the bounty hunter, who has knowledge of him. Consider another scene in which the dialogue is as good as any you will hear this year. Chigurh enters a rundown gas station in the middle of wilderness and begins to play a word game with the old man (Gene Jones) behind the cash register, who becomes very nervous. It is clear they are talking about whether Chigurh will kill him. Chigurh has by no means made up his mind. Without explaining why, he asks the man to call the flip of a coin. Listen to what they say, how they say it, how they imply the stakes. Listen to their timing. You want to applaud the writing, which comes from the Coen brothers, out of McCarthy. The $2 million turns out to be easier to obtain than to keep. Moss tries hiding in obscure hotels. Scenes are meticulously constructed in which each man knows the other is nearby. Moss can run but he can't hide. Chigurh always tracks him down. He shadows him like his doom, never hurrying, always moving at the same measured pace, like a pursuer in a nightmare. This movie is a masterful evocation of time, place, character, moral choices, immoral certainties, human nature and fate. It is also, in the photography by Roger Deakins, the editing by the Coens and the music by Carter Burwell, startlingly beautiful, stark and lonely. As McCarthy does with the Judge, the hairless exterminator in his "Blood Meridian" (Ridley Scott's next film), and as in his "Suttree," especially in the scene where the riverbank caves in, the movie demonstrates how pitiful ordinary human feelings are in the face of implacable injustice. The movie also loves some of its characters, and pities them, and has an ear for dialog not as it is spoken but as it is dreamed. Many of the scenes in "No Country for Old Men" are so flawlessly constructed that you want them to simply continue, and yet they create an emotional suction drawing you to the next scene. Another movie that made me feel that way was "Fargo." To make one such film is a miracle. Here is another. By Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
THE KITE RUNNER - Rated PG-13 - 128 minutes - Scope
How long has it been since you saw a movie that succeeds as pure story? That doesn't depend on stars, effects or genres, but simply fascinates you with how it will turn out? Marc Forster's "The Kite Runner," based on a much-loved novel, is a movie like that. It superimposes human faces and a historical context on the tragic images of war from Afghanistan. The story begins with boys flying kites. It is the city of Kabul in 1978, before the Russians, the Taliban, the Americans and the anarchy. Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) joins with countless other boys in filling the sky with kites; sometimes they dance on the rooftops while dueling, trying to cut other kite strings with their own. Amir's friend is Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), the son of the family's longtime servant Ali, who has been with them for years and has become like family himself. Hassan is the best kite runner in the neighborhood, correctly predicting when a kite will return to earth and waiting there to retrieve it. The boys live in a healthy, vibrant city, not yet touched by war. Amir's father, Baba (Homayoun Ershadi), is an intellectual and secularist who has no use for the mullahs. Baba, whose kindly eyes are benevolent, loves both boys. There is a neighborhood bully named Assef, jealous of Amir's kite, his skills and his kite runner. On a day that will shape the course of many lives, he and his gang track down Hassan, attack him and rape him. Amir arrives to see the assault taking place, and to his shame, sneaks away. Then a curious chemistry takes place. Amir feels so guilty about Hassan that his feelings transform into anger, and he tries insulting his friend, even throwing ripe fruit at him, but Hassan is impassive. Then Amir tries to plant evidence to make Hassan seem like a thief, but even after Hassan (untruthfully and masochistically) confesses, Baba forgives him. It is Hassan's father, Ali, who insists he and his son must leave the home, over Baba's protests. The film has opened with the modern-day Amir, now living in San Francisco, receiving a telephone call from Rahim Khan: "You should come home. There is a way to be good again." Then commences a remarkable series of old memories and new realities, of the present trying to heal the wounds of the past, of an adult trying to repair the damage he set in motion as a boy. For if he had not lied about Hassan, they would all be together in San Francisco and the telephone call would not have been necessary. Working from Khaled Hosseini's best seller, Forster and his screenwriter David Benioff have made a film that sidesteps the emotional disconnects we often feel when a story moves between past and present. This is all the same story, interlaced with the fabric of these lives. There is also a touching sequence as Amir and his father, now older and ill, meet a once-powerful Afghan general and his daughter Soraya (Atossa Leoni). For Amir and Soraya, it is instant love, but protocol must be observed, and one of the movie's warmest scenes involves the two old men discussing the future of their children. I want to mention once again the eyes, indeed the whole face, of the actor Homayoun Ershadi, as Amir's father; here is a face so deeply good, it is difficult to imagine it reflecting unworthy feelings. What happens back in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) in the year 2000 need not be revealed here, but the scenes combine great suspense with deep emotion. One emblematic moment: A soccer game where the audience, all men and all oddly silent, is watched by guards with rifles. The film works so deeply on us because we have been so absorbed by its story, by its destinies, by the way these individuals become so important that we are forced to stop thinking of "Afghans" as simply a category of body counts on the news. The movie is acted largely in English, although many (subtitled) scenes are in Dari, which I learn is an Afghan dialect of Farsi, or Persian. The performances by the actors playing Amir and Hassan as children are natural, convincing and powerful; recently I have seen several such child performances that adults would envy for their conviction and strength. Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, as young Hassan, is particularly striking, with his serious, sometimes almost mournful face. (The boy now fears Afghan reprisals for appearing in the rape scene, and the producers have helped to relocate him.) One of the areas in which the movie succeeds is in its depiction of kite flying. Yes, it uses special effects, but they function to represent what freedom and exhilaration the kites represent to their owners. I remember my own fierce identification with my own kites as a child. I was up there; I was represented. Yet there is a fundamental difference between the kite flyer (Amir) and the kite runner (Hassan). Perhaps that sad wisdom in Hassan's eyes comes from his certainty that all must fall to earth, sooner or later. This is a magnificent film by Marc Forster, now 38, who since "Monster's Ball" (2001) has made "Finding Neverland" (2004), "Stay" (2005) and "Stranger Than Fiction" (2006). All fine work, but "The Kite Runner" equals "Monster's Ball" in its emotional impact. Like "House of Sand and Fog" and "Man Push Cart," it helps us to understand that the newcomers among us come from somewhere and are somebody.
JUNO - Rated PG-13 - 96 minutes - Flat
Jason Reitman's "Juno" is just about the best movie of the year. It is very smart, very funny and very touching; it begins with the pacing of a screwball comedy and ends as a portrait of characters we have come to love. Strange, how during Juno's hip dialogue and cocky bravado, we begin to understand the young woman inside, and we want to hug her. Has there been a better performance this year than Ellen Page's creation of Juno? I don't think so. If most actors agree that comedy is harder than drama, then harder still is comedy depending on a quick mind, utter self-confidence, and an ability to stop just short of going too far. Page's presence and timing are extraordinary. I have seen her in only two films, she is only 20, and I think she will be one of the great actors of her time. But don't let my praise get in the way of sharing how much fun this movie is. It is so very rare to sit with an audience that leans forward with delight and is in step with every turn and surprise of an uncommonly intelligent screenplay. It is so rare to hear laughter that is surprised, unexpected and delighted. So rare to hear it coming during moments of recognition, when characters reflect exactly what we'd be thinking, just a moment before we get around to thinking it. So rare to feel the audience joined into one warm, shared enjoyment. So rare to hear a movie applauded. Ellen Page plays Juno MacGuff, a 16-year-old girl who decides it is time for her to experience sex and enlists her best friend Paulie (Michael Cera) in an experiment he is not too eager to join. Of course she gets pregnant, and after a trip to an abortion clinic that leaves her cold, she decides to have the child. But what to do with it? She believes she's too young to raise it herself. Her best girlfriend Leah (Olivia Thirby) suggests looking at the ads for adoptive parents in the Penny Saver: "They have 'Desperately Seeking Spawn,' right next to the pet ads." Juno informs her parents in a scene that decisively establishes how original this film is going to be. It does that by giving us almost the only lovable parents in the history of teen comedies: Bren (Allison Janney) and Mac (J.K. Simmons). They're older and wiser than most teen parents are ever allowed to be, and warmer and with better instincts and quicker senses of humor. Informed that the sheepish Paulie is the father, Mac turns to his wife and shares an aside that brings down the house. Later, Bren tells him, "You know, of course, it wasn't his idea." How infinitely more human and civilized their response is than all the sad routine "humor" about parents who are enraged at boyfriends. Mac goes with Juno to meet the would-be adoptive parents, Vanessa and Mark Loring (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman). They live in one of those houses that look like Martha Stewart finished a second before they arrived. Vanessa is consumed with her desire for a child, and Mark is almost a child himself, showing Juno "my room," where he keeps the residue of his ambition to be a rock star. What he does now, at around 40, is write jingles for commercials. We follow Juno through all nine months of her pregnancy, which she pretends to treat as mostly an inconvenience. It is uncanny how Page shows us, without seeming to show us, the deeper feelings beneath Juno's wisecracking exterior. The screenplay by first-timer Diablo Cody is a subtle masterpiece of construction, as buried themes slowly emerge, hidden feelings become clear, and we are led, but not too far, into wondering if Mark and Juno might possibly develop unwise feelings about one another. There are moments of instinctive, lightning comedy: Bren's response to a nurse's attitude during Juno's sonar scan, and her theory about doctors when Juno wants a pain-killer during childbirth. Moments that blindside us with truth, as when Mac and Juno talk about the possibility of true and lasting love. Moments that reveal Paulie as more than he seems. What he says when Juno says he's cool and doesn't even need to try. And the breathtaking scene when Juno and Vanessa run into each other in the mall and the future of everyone is essentially decided. Jennifer Garner glows in that scene. After three viewings, I feel like I know some scenes by heart, but I don't want to spoil your experience by quoting one-liners and revealing surprises. The film's surprises, in any event, involve not merely the plot but insights into the characters, including feelings that coil along just beneath the surface so that they seem inevitable when they're revealed. The film has no wrong scenes and no extra scenes, and flows like running water. There are two repeating motifs: the enchanting songs, so simple and true, by Kimya Dawson. And the seasonal appearances of Paulie's high school cross-country team, running past us with dogged consistency, Paulie often bringing up the rear, until his last run ends with Paulie, sweaty in running shorts, racing to Juno's room after her delivery.
Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
PERSEPOLIS - Rated PG-13 - 95 minutes - Flat
I attended the Tehran Film Festival in 1972 and was invited to the home of my guide and translator to meet her parents and family. Over tea and elegant pastries, they explained proudly that Iran was a "modern" country, that they were devout Muslims but did not embrace the extremes of other Islamic nations, that their nation represented a new way. Whenever I read another story about the clerical rule that now grips Iran, I think of those people, and millions of other Iranians like them, who do not agree with the rigid restrictions they live under, particularly the women. Iranians are no more monolithic than we are, a truth not grasped by our own zealous leader. Remember, on 9/11 there was a huge candlelight vigil in Tehran in sympathy with us. That was the Iran that Marjane Satrapi was born into in 1969, and it was the Iran that ended in the late 1970s with the fall and exile of the shah. Yes, his rule was dictatorial; yes, his secret police were everywhere and his opponents subjected to torture. But that was the norm in the Middle East and in an arc stretching up to the Soviet Union. At least most Iranians were left more or less free to lead the lives they chose. Ironically, many of them believed the fall of the shah would bring more, not less, democracy. Satrapi remembers the first nine or 10 years of her life as a wonderful time. Surrounded by a loving, independently minded family, living in a comfortable time, she resembled teenagers everywhere in her love for pop music, her interest in fashion, her Nikes. Then it all changed. She and her mother and her feisty grandmother had to shroud their faces from the view of men. Makeup and other forms of Western decadence were forbidden. At her age she didn't drink or smoke, but God save any women who did. Satrapi, now living in Paris, told her life story in two graphic novels, which became best sellers and have now been made into this wondrous animated film. The animation is mostly in black sand white, with infinite shades of gray and a few guest appearances, here and there, by colors. The style is deliberately two-dimensional, avoiding the illusion of depth in current animation. This approach may sound spartan, but it is surprisingly involving, wrapping us in this autobiography that distills an epoch into a young women's life. Not surprisingly, the books have been embraced by smart teenage girls all over the world, who find much they identify with. Adolescence is fueled by universal desires and emotions, having little to do with government decrees. Marjane, voiced as a child by Gabrielle Lopes and as a teenager and adult by Chiara Mastroianni, is a sprightly kid, encouraged in her rambunction by her parents (voiced by Catherine Deneuve and Simon Abkarian) and applauded by her outspoken grandmother (Danielle Darrieux). She dotes on the stories of her spellbinding Uncle Anouche (Francois Jerosme), who has been in prison and sometimes in hiding, but gives her a vision of the greater world. In her teens, with the Ayatollah Khomeini under full steam, Iran turns into a hostile place for the spirits of those such as Marjane. The society she thought she lived in has disappeared, and with it much of her freedom as a woman to define herself outside of marriage and the fearful restrictions of men. Sometimes she fast-talks herself out of tight corners, as when she is almost arrested for wearing makeup, but it is clear to her parents that Marjane will eventually attract trouble. They send her to live with friends in Vienna.Austria provides her with a radically different society, but one she eventually finds impossible to live in. She was raised with values that do not fit with the casual sex and drug use she finds among her contemporaries there, and after going a little wild with rock 'n' roll and acting out, she doesn't like herself, is homesick, and returns to Iran. But it is even more inhospitable than she remembers. She is homesick for a nation that no longer exists. In real life, Marjane Satrapi eventually found a congenial home in France. I imagine Paris offered no less decadence than Vienna, but her experiences had made her into a woman more sure of herself and her values, and she grew into -- well, the author of books and this film, which dramatize so meaningfully what her life has been like. For she is no heroine, no flag-waving idealist, no rebel, not always wise, sometimes reckless, but with strong family standards. It might seem that her story is too large for one 98-minute film, but "Persepolis" tells it carefully, lovingly and with great style. It is infinitely more interesting than the witless coming-of-age Western girls we meet in animated films; in spirit, in gumption, in heart, Marjane resembles someone like the heroine is "Juno" -- not that she is pregnant at 16, of course. While so many films about coming of age involve manufactured dilemmas, here is one about a woman who indeed does come of age, and magnificently. Although France selected "Persepolis" as its official Oscar entry in the foreign-language category, the film was not among the nine titles chosen for the second round of nominations. It was, however, nominated for best animated feature.
Review by Roger Ebert; www.rogerebert.suntimes.com
THE BAND'S VISIT - Rated PG-13 - 89 minutes - Flat
The eight men wear sky-blue uniforms with gold braid on the shoulders. They look like extras in an opera. They dismount from a bus in the middle of nowhere and stand uncertainly on the sidewalk. They are near a highway interchange, leading no doubt to where they’d rather be. Across the street is a small cafe. Regarding them are two bored layabouts and a sadly, darkly beautiful woman. They are a band from Egypt, the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra. Their leader, a severe man with a perpetually dour expression, crosses the street and asks the woman for directions to the Arab Cultural Center. She looks at him as if he stepped off a flying saucer. “Here there is no Arab culture,” she says. “Also, no Israeli culture. Here there is no culture at all.” They are in the middle of the Israeli desert, having taken the wrong bus to the wrong destination. Another bus will not come until tomorrow. “The Band’s Visit” begins with this premise, which could supply the makings of a comedy, and turns into a quiet, sympathetic film about the loneliness that surrounds us. Oh, and there is some comedy, after all. The town they have arrived at is lacking in interest even for those who live there. It is seemingly without activity. The bandleader, named Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai), asks if there is a hotel. The woman, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), is amused. No hotel. They communicate in careful, correct English; she more fluent, he weighing every word. Tewfiq explains their dilemma. They are to play a concert tomorrow at the opening of a new Arab cultural center in a place has that almost, but not quite, the same name as the place they are in. Tewfiq starts out to lead a march down the highway in the correct direction. There is some dissent, especially from the tall young troublemaker Haled (Saleh Bakri). He complains that they have not eaten. After some awkward negotiations (they have little Israeli currency), the Egyptians are served soup and bread in Dina’s cafe. It is strange, how the static, barren, lifeless nature of the town seeps into the picture, even though the writer-director Eran Kolirin uses no establishing shots or any effort at all to show us anything beyond the cafe — and later, Dina’s apartment and an almost empty restaurant. Dina offers to put up Tewfiq and Haled at her apartment, and tells the young layabouts (who seem permanently anchored to their chairs outside her cafe) that they must take the others home to their families. And then begins a long, quiet night of guarded revelations, shared isolation and tentative tenderness. Dina is tough but not invulnerable. Life has given her little that she hoped for. Tewfiq is a man with an invisible psychic weight on his shoulders. Haled, under everything, is an awkward kid. They go for a snack at the restaurant, its barren tables reaching away under bright lights, and Dina points out a man who comes in with his family. A sometime lover of hers, she tells Tewfiq. Even adultery seems weary here. When the three end up back at Dina’s apartment, where she offers them wine, the evening settles down into resignation. It is clear that Dina feels tender toward Tewfiq, that she can see through his timid reserve to the good soul inside. But there is no movement. Later, when he makes a personal revelation, it is essentially an apology. The movie avoids what we might expect, a meeting of the minds, and gives us instead a sharing of quiet desperation. As Dina and Twefiq, Ronit Elkabetz and Sasson Gabai bring great fondness and amusement to their characters. She is pushing middle age, he is being pushed by it. It is impossible for this night to lead to anything in their future lives. But it could lead to a night to remember. Gabai plays the bandleader as so repressed or shy or wounded that he seems closed inside himself. As we watch Elkabetz putting on a new dress for the evening and inspecting herself in the mirror, we see not vanity but hope. Throughout the evening, we note her assertion, her confidence, her easily assumed air of independence. Yet when she gazes into the man’s eyes, she sighs with regret and mentions that as a girl she loved the Omar Sharif movies that played daily on Israeli TV, but play no more. There are some amusing interludes. A band member plays the first few notes of a sonata he has not finished (after years). A bandmate calls him Schubert. A local man keeps solitary vigil by a pay phone, waiting for a call from the girl he loves. He has an insistent way of showing his impatience when another uses the phone. In the morning, the band reassembles and leaves. “The Band’s Visit” has not provided any of the narrative payoffs we might have expected, but has provided something more valuable: An interlude involving two “enemies,” Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty.
Review by Roger Ebert, www.rogerebert.suntimes.com
STREET KINGS - Rated R - 109 minutes - Scope
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High-stakes cop dramas nowadays need to find that balance between good and bad, right and wrong, action and story. Having all flash and no cash is what plagues many of them: the filmmakers think that audiences don't care that the mayor's daughter or the fire chief's Dalmatian but how bullets will they fire from their guns, how many cars with they total or what building to they have to destroy to accomplish that. Others simply toss together so inane, banal dialogue for over two hours and call it visceral drama when it should be called snooze cinema. Ah, but dear readers, I know you are much more intelligent than that, and so do the filmmakers of "Street Kings." LAPD Vice Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) is no simple black and white; he's more of a gray, blurring the distinctions of cops and the bad guys, such as setting up a couple of Korean gang members to steal his car that has a military-grade machine gun in the trunk-all to kick in their door, blow them away, and save twin girls being used as teenage objects of desire. His direct superior, Capt. Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), lauds Tom while turning a blind eye to how he made the big saves and arrests. However, Tom's methods don't come with a sense of guilt and depression as he downs shooters of vodka while patrolling the deep, gang-infested neighborhoods of the city of angels-all to cover the death of his wife.
Then, word comes to light that Tom's former partner Terrence Washington (Terry Crews) has been snitching on Tom and his fellow vice busting crew but Tom will be the sacrificial lamb, so to speak. When Tom shows up at a convenience store to talk to and try and reason with Terrence, two gangbangers bust in and shoot up the place-and Terrence. Video surveillance shows that Tom could be implicated in the crime.
Popping up is Capt. James Biggs (Hugh Laurie) from internal affairs, wanting to help Tom come clean and bust a few bad cops along the way. Meanwhile, Paul Diskant (Chris Evans) is the robbery homicide detective in charge of piecing together Washington's slaughter and teams with Tom "off the record," so to speak, in a separate, guerilla-style investigation and Tom's own brand of justice while discovering new and interesting details that twist along the journey. This is the second film from director David Ayer, who's best know for writing the script to "Training Day," which gave Denzel Washington an immense amount of hard-hitting dialogue to construct a performance that garnered a Best Actor Oscar. During Ayer's directorial debut, 2006's "Harsh Times," he brought a similar powerful yet under appreciated performance from Christian Bale as an ex-Army ranger dealing with the mental trauma of the vast violence he's experienced. For his sophomore effort, Ayer gave writing duties to another talented writer: author James Ellroy. Ellroy wrote the books that were transformed into the films "The Black Dahlia" and one of my personal favorites and arguably one of the bets films of the 1990s "L.A. Confidential" and he brings us a screenplay here with such vibrant, albeit colorful, language and a gripping story that is one of the year's first great screenplays-and one of the year's best films. Reeves continues to show his unabashed dramatic talent that erases his "Bill & Ted" years: he's matured and grown into his own. And when you pair him up with such a powerhouse of an actor like Whitaker, sparks and emotion fly. Whitaker turns in yet another towering performance, another actor who earned his due just over one year ago when claiming the Academy Award for Best Actor for his commanding performance of dictator Idi Amin in "The Last King of Scotland." Also of impressive yet underused work is Hugh Laurie, who is conveniently introduced here at a hospital, an obvious yet still humorous, tongue-in-cheek reference to his famed status as the title doctor on the hit TV show "House." In a way, the film plays a bit like an ensemble piece, but you can't share the wealth of these three talents. Ayer is also good at painting a very accurate portrait of life in the crime-ridden areas of Los Angeles, including actors who were at one point gang members themselves and rappers known for their own hardcore image, including The Game and Chicago-native Common, who has a budding acting career ahead following last year's "American Gangster," this summer's "Wanted" with Angelina Jolie and a rumored part in Warner Bros' delayed "Justice League" as the Green Lantern.
I was with this movie from start to finish, even during the slightly uneven pacing of some parts of the film and the predictable, if not expected, ending. "Street Kings" doesn't have to worry about doing the job by the rules: it breaks them all to create tension, suspense and character that go beyond the laws of entertainment and acting.
Review by Matt Sheehan, movieweb.com
Paranoid Park - Rated R - 84 minutes - Flat
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Paranoid Park is a swooping skateboarding free zone where young men learn to fly. It’s also the title of Gus Van Sant’s most recent film, a haunting, voluptuously beautiful portrait of a teenage boy who, after being suddenly caught in midflight, falls to earth. Like most of Mr. Van Sant’s films “Paranoid Park” is about bodies at rest and in motion, and about longing, beauty, youth and death, and as such as much about the artist as his subject. It is a modestly scaled triumph without a false or wasted moment. One of the most important and critically marginalized American filmmakers working in the commercial mainstream, Mr. Van Sant has traveled from down-and-out independent to Hollywood hire to aesthetic iconoclast, a trajectory that holds its own fascination and mysteries. The Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr has been instrumental in Mr. Van Sant’s recent artistic renaissance — evident in his newfound love of hypnotically long and gliding camera moves — though his tenure in the mainstream has left its mark too, as demonstrated by his rejection of straight narrative. As in three-act, character-driven, commercially honed narrative in which boys will be boys of a certain type and girls will be girls right alongside them. The boy in “Paranoid Park,” Alex (the newcomer Gabe Nevins), lives and skates in Portland, Ore., where one evening he is implicated in the brutal death of a security guard. In adapting the young-adult novel by Blake Nelson, Mr. Van Sant has retained much of the story — a man dies, Alex writes it all down — but has reshuffled the original’s chain of events to create an elliptical narrative that continually folds back on itself. Shortly after the film opens, you see Alex writing the words Paranoid Park in a notebook, a gesture that appears to set off a flurry of seemingly disconnected visuals — boys leaping through the air in slow motion, clouds racing across the sky in fast — that piece together only later. With his on-and-off narration and pencil, Alex is effectively shaping this story, but in his own singular voice. (“I’m writing this a little out of order. Sorry. I didn’t do so well in creative writing.”) Although you regularly hear that voice — at times in Alex’s surprisingly childish, unmodulated recitation, at times in dialogue with other characters — you mostly experience it visually, as if you were watching a still-evolving film unwinding in the boy’s head. Mr. Van Sant isn’t simply trying to take us inside another person’s consciousness; he’s also exploring the byways, dead ends, pitfalls and turning points in the geography of conscience, which makes the recurrent image of the skate park — with its perilous ledges, its soaring ramps and fleetingly liberated bodies — extraordinarily powerful. Mr. Van Sant’s use of different film speeds and jump cuts, and his tendency to underscore his own storytelling — he regularly, almost compulsively repeats certain images and lines — reinforces rather than undermines the story’s realism. With its soft, smudged colors and caressing lighting, “Paranoid Park” looks like a dream — the cinematographers are Christopher Doyle and Rain Kathy Li — but the story is truer than most kitchen-sink dramas. This isn’t the canned realism of the tidy psychological exegesis; this is realism that accepts the mystery and ambiguity of human existence. It is the realism that André Bazin sees in the world of Roberto Rossellini: a world of “pure acts, unimportant in themselves,” that prepare the way “for the sudden dazzling revelation of their meaning.” The pure acts in “Paranoid Park” mostly involve young male skateboarders gliding and sometimes hurtling through the air. Shot in both grainy Super-8 and velvety 35-millimeter film, these bodies appear alternately grounded and out of this world, reflecting extremes of physical effort while also suggesting different states of being. The Super-8 images of young men rolling along concrete, flipping boards and attitude, have the vaguely battered quality of old home movies, as if someone had just pulled the footage from a drawer. The glossier 35-millimeter images, by contrast, look almost monumental, epic, nowhere more so than when Mr. Van Sant shows one after another skateboarder suspended in the air at the peak of his jump, each a vision of Icarus. Closer to earth, Alex roams through his world like an alien, a zombie, a prisoner, mostly mute, his features fixed, face blank and impenetrable. He says little, betrays less. His smiles are brief, infrequent. He’s adrift in a sea of near-strangers, including his parents, who are almost as conceptual as those in “Peanuts” (Dad’s tattoos notwithstanding), and his girlfriend (Taylor Momsen), a coltish cheerleader who wants to lose her virginity to him for the sake of convenience. (Mr. Van Sant has rarely been as patient with his female characters as he is with his male ones.) Alex’s single close connection is with his friend Jared (Jake Miller), who brings him to the skate park with the warning “No one’s ever really ready for Paranoid Park.” Mr. Van Sant has always made a home for lost boys, from River Phoenix’s wanderer in “My Own Private Idaho” to the ghostly Kurt Cobain figure who roams through “Last Days,” those downy, itinerant beauties whose words stick to their tongues and whose pain seems as bottomless as their eyes. In some respects Paranoid Park represents adulthood; the critic Amy Taubin has provocatively suggested to Mr. Van Sant that the film’s subtext is that of a gay initiation. (He didn’t disagree.) Both readings are ripe for the picking. But what strikes me the hardest about “Paranoid Park” is the intimacy, the love — carnal, paternal, human — of Mr. Van Sant’s expansive, embracing vision. No one is ever really ready for Paranoid Park, but neither do you have to go there alone.
Review by: Manohla Dargis, nytimes.com
Horton Hears a Who - Rated G - 86 minutes - Flat
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Of all the Dr. Seuss classics, Twentieth Century Fox made a suitable choice to adapt “Horton Hears a Who!” to the big screen. This 1954 tale not only creates a dual world of life-size and minuscule characters – i.e., the Whos of Whoville, who inhabit a city situated on a mote of dust as if it were a planet. The allegories of this tale are made accessible for young readers. As Horton, the happy-trotting elephant of the Jungle of Nool, discovers Whoville with a very keen ear, Theodor Geisel's (Dr. Seuss) simple metaphysical tale inspires kids to wonder about the world around them, especially everything they cannot see. In the 1950s, as TV arrived to American homes, Geisel encouraged kids to go outside and let their minds illustrate for them. Sources as wide-ranging as the “Twilight Zone” and the 2001 Farrelly brothers animated film “Osmosis Jones” owe a debt to Geisel's light-handed metaphor, which Chuck Jones made into a cartoon for television in 1970. And the thematic richness doesn't end there: when Horton spreads word of the newfound city and vows to protect it, others from the Jungle of Nool treat him like a dangerous rebel, one whose fantasies will ruin the minds of children. Horton becomes the target of something like a witch hunt – in a book appearing after the McCarthy hearings, let's not forget – and must make the members of Whoville heard, or they'll be destroyed. In a story about inspiring wonder, Horton's persecutors symbolize influences out to kill youthful imagination. This production delivers “Horton” as a richly animated tale. In the opening scenes, Horton (voiced by Seuss-vet Jim Carrey, earning his keep with vigor) appears lively enough that kids will forget that he's an illustration. The real treat comes when Whoville appears onscreen, and classic Seuss is brought to the world of modern animation. The Whos have an endearing stiffness that the storybook characters suggest, when it would have been all too easy to embellish them into something alien to the source material. (Think of the recent big screen “Garfield,” who couldn't be a distant cousin of the original – or even Jim Carrey's Grinch, for that matter.) This Whoville is the bustling little city that we all read about, led by the lovable Mayor (Steve Carell, matching Carrey in vocal umph), with his dozens of children and an inclination for slipping up. Even if Horton's world can't shine like Whoville, this movie's visuals keeps things vivid, while digital animation is so often crisp, precise, and cold. For adults, the images of Whoville grow commonplace after awhile, similarly to how the visual inspiration in “The Simpsons” movie couldn't last its feature length. And hearing Steve Carell's frantic calls to save Whoville will hit a sour note for older viewers, as it reminds us of "Evan Almighty's" attempts to deal with a flood in that overproduced wreck of a film. But all this won't mean a thing to the kids, who at the screening I attended were dazzled by the interchange from Horton's world to Whoville, as one strives to help the other. The young viewers cheered their way to the triumph, and I can imagine them looking out of car windows in wonder as they rode home from the theater.
Review by Matthew Sorrento, filmthreat.com
Son of Rambow - Rated PG-13 - 96 minutes - Scope
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Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner) and Lee Carter (Will Poulter) have nothing in common besides being 11 years old. Shy, lonely Will belongs to the Plymouth Brethren religious sect that makes no allowances for such worldly distractions as television or movies. Lee is the class hellion, an aggressive kid who probably spends more time in detention than in class. But a chance encounter between the two leads to an unlikely friendship and a burgeoning partnership as junior auteurs in Garth Jennings' hysterically funny, yet terrifically sweet homage to childhood and movies in the wonderful Son of Rambow. Jennings was only 11 himself when the original Rambo movie, First Blood, came out, and the writer/director who would go on to co-found the Hammer & Tongs video outfit and to direct the lively big-screen adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, pays tribute to the influence Sylvester Stallone's violent action hero had on his life. When Will accidentally watches a pirated video of First Blood, he is entranced, imagining himself as the "son of Rambow." That fits in perfectly with Carter's plan to make a movie to enter into a young filmmaker's competition. He recruits Will as both actor and stunt man in a series of dangerous gags, any one of which looks like it might lead to Will's death by misadventure. There is more, of course, such as the way the project sets Will on a collision course with his family's religious beliefs, to the consternation of his widowed mother, Mary (Jessica Stevenson). Carter, too, has family troubles, with a neglectful, globetrotting mother and an older brother resentful of his babysitting role. Then there's Didier (Jules Sitruk), the older French exchange student—the coolest kid in school—who catches wind of the project and decides he wants to be part of it, to Will's delight and Carter's disgust. What is readily apparent in all of this is that Jennings remembers exactly what it was like to be a movie-mad kid. Will and Carter's adventures may be exaggerated—especially some of the stunts that send Will flying through the air like a missile—but there is also the ring of truth in the idea of these little boys making like pint-sized Cecil B. DeMilles as they mount their own epic. The friendship that develops between the pair plays true, as well; for as different as they are, each is isolated, both at home and at school. Beneath their disparate surfaces, they have everything in common. But Son of Rambow is not just about these two lads; it is also about England during a particular era. Jennings captures the '80s in all its absurd, big-haired glory—the fashion, the pop music, even the Space Dust candy (the U.K.'s answer to Pop Rocks). An early scene in a movie theater establishes the era perfectly, as Jennings' camera pans over the crowd and every single person (kids included) has a cigarette clenched between their teeth. It's a visually arresting image that sets the time even as it creates a laugh. This was supposed to be Jennings' feature debut, but it turned out to be easier to finance the much bigger Hitchhiker's Guide than this more modest affair. That under-appreciated first effort was a lot of fun, but Son of Rambow is the superior film.
Money might buy bigger toys, but it can never replace heart, and that is something this terrific comedy has in abundance.
Review by Pam Grady, reel.com
Then She Found Me - Rated R - 100 minutes - Flat
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“Then She Found Me,” a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment. The directorial debut of Helen Hunt, who plays April Epner, an anxious 39-year-old kindergarten teacher in New York City, it has all the ingredients of a slick, commercial farce, which it emphatically is not. In fact, the movie, based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, has enough material for two such farces. In one, a childless mother obsessed with her ticking biological clock becomes pregnant after clumsy breakup sex with her husband of less than a year. (Her obstetrician is played by, of all people, Salman Rushdie.) In the other, a woman who has just lost her adoptive mother is suddenly besieged by a garrulous local talk-show personality who claims to be her biological mother. The movie is unusually sensitive to the anxieties around adoption. Shortly before her death, April’s ailing mother (Lynn Cohen) argues that there is no difference between raising an adopted child and one of your own; her daughter should cease fretting and adopt a Chinese baby, she declares. April’s vehement refusal to consider the possibility rings as a tacit insult to her mother’s parenting skills, but the simmering conflict is never brought into the open. Ms. Hunt takes every opportunity to avoid easy comic shtick and cutesy-poo sentimentality in an effort to make her characters act and sound like real people. Where typical Hollywood comedies erase ethnicity, Ms. Hunt emphasizes her characters’ various shades of Jewishness. April doesn’t seem especially religious, but in the opening scene she goes through a Jewish wedding ceremony with her childish husband, Ben (Matthew Broderick), who goes to live with his mother after their breakup. “Then She Found Me” also clearly indicates that the characters’ lifestyles are not unrealistically comfortable. All the stars, including Ms. Hunt, are pointedly deglamorized. April, alarmingly gaunt, with straining neck tendons, appears to wear little or no makeup. As her biological mother, Bernice Graves, Bette Midler is a blowsy, plump loudmouth and bottle redhead whose obsequious behavior makes much of what she says sound false. Indeed some of it is. In her first of several lies, she claims that April was conceived in a delirious one-night stand with Steve McQueen and relinquished for adoption after three days.April’s would-be romantic savior, Frank (Colin Firth), the recently divorced father of two children (one is April’s pupil), looks as if he is going to seed. Spluttering, neurotic and hot-tempered, he has all the romantic promise of an over-the-hill Lancelot astride a tottering nag. Frank also lives in a seedy suburban neighborhood far from any center of action. Mr. Broderick’s Ben is a bloated, inarticulate man-child. His two awkward sex scenes with Ms. Hunt (one in the back seat of a car) are desperate, joyless quickies that involve minimal undressing and leave April confused and Ben apologetic. It falls to Ms. Hunt to stir these character types and clichéd situations into a palatable stew of genuine human emotions. As April cautiously makes her way, you can feel Ms. Hunt, both as director and actor,
discarding sitcom conventions to shoot for something deeper and truer. And she achieves it, mostly through the shaded performances of Mr.
Firth and Ms. Midler, as well as her own. Mr. Firth’s Frank is hyper-emotional to a degree rarely seen in male characters in mainstream movies.
When Frank gets upset, which is frequently, his face reddens, he bluntly speaks his mind and he often excuses himself to go for a walk and let off steam.
Ms. Midler’s Bernice is a credible portrait of a narcissistic drama queen with a good heart beneath her celebrity bluster. Connections between the characters
deepen in spite of misunderstandings and obstacles. After April and Frank acknowledge their mutual attraction, their wary courtship proceeds in fits and starts,
but they keep at it. Life isn’t easy for April as she muddles along, but you feel she is headed in the right direction. Review by Stephen Holden, movies.nytimes.com
Mongol - Rated R - 126 minutes - Scope
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While the historical accuracy may be dodgy, Mongol is a sweeping and quasi-mythical epic that recalls Lawrence of Arabia. Centered on the rise of Genghis Khan, the film is an enthralling tale, in the style of a David Lean saga, with similarly gorgeous cinematography. It combines a sprawling adventure saga with romance, family drama and riveting action sequences. The film has a visceral energy with powerful battle sequences and also scenes of striking and serene physical beauty. Its only flaw: there might have been one battle too many. Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano is impressive and haunting, playing Khan as both a fearless warrior and a feeling human being. He is not played as a barbarian as much as he is an inspiring, visionary and, yes, ruthless leader, driven by commitment to his people and his family. We see the early fire in the conqueror's youthful years and watch as he is imprisoned, tortured and endures to become a man who conquered a huge swath of the world. We also see that he was sustained by his lifelong love, Borte (Khulan Chuluun), a strong and spirited woman who was his trusted advisor. Director Sergei Bodrov (Prisoner of the Mountains) illuminates Khan's life in a multi-dimensional way, and his re-creation of the bleak and expansive beauty of Mongolia in the 12th and 13th centuries is arresting. Mongol is quality escapism: an exotic saga that compels, moves and envelops us with its grand and captivating story. Review by Claudia Puig, USA TODAY
Note by Note - NR - 88 minutes
A grand piano represents a remarkable fusion of engineering and artistry, technical savvy and soul. It's a complicated machine capable of playing the most delicate melodies. Making one takes a lot of blood, sweat, and elbow grease, as Ben Niles proves in his obsessive new documentary Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037.
Niles follows a single Steinway piano over the yearlong process of transforming wood, wires, and an endless assortment of precise components into a vessel for musical beauty. All sorts of painstaking labor has to take place before little Johnny can pound away at a crude approximation of "Chopsticks." Niles' film opens up into a mellow, serene meditation on musicians' symbiotic relationship with their instruments, the rewards and costs of craftsmanship in an age of industrialization, and the timeless mystique of the piano, a finely tuned machine with a direct line to the human soul.
The eloquent professional pianists queried here, including Harry Connick Jr. and Lang Lang (who tells an amusing anecdote about how a Tom & Jerry cartoon inspired his lifelong passion for the piano), attempt a spiritual communion with their instrument of choice. Steinway is piano porn for inveterate ivory-ticklers whose hearts skip a beat at the sight of a Steinway glistening in the sunlight. For non-musicians, however, it can be awfully dry, and Niles never explores the bitter irony of fundamentally working-class people painstakingly creating objects of beauty and art they couldn't possibly afford. The Steinway employees and the professional musicians who travel the world playing their products each make their livings with their hands, but in vastly different ways. It's a testament to the film's artistry that it almost never feels like a feature-length Steinway infomercial. Then again, infomercials are seldom this leisurely paced or austere.
Review by Nathan Rabin
Young @ Heart - Rated PG - 109 minutes - Flat
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The Rolling Stones, as it turns out, are not the only senior citizens singing rock 'n' roll. Another, rather unexpected group is singing lyrics that are more cutting edge and performing on-screen antics that are considerably more amusing. You won't believe the world of "Young@Heart," but you'll have a hard time resisting it. The irresistible New England chorus of senior citizens proves you're never too old to rock. The Young@Heart Chorus is a 24-member singing group from Northampton, Mass., average age 80, who spend a chunk of their golden years touring the world and singing covers of songs from groups like the Talking Heads, the Clash and Coldplay. It's safe to say that the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" has never had a more heartfelt rendition. This may sound like a suspect enterprise, a musical gimmick impossible to embrace, but the reality is otherwise. For what the members of this uncanny chorus lack in pure ability they make up for in irrepressible spirits and a desire to simply have fun. It's as much of a heady tonic for these folks to take on these unlikely lyrics as it is for us to watch it all go down. Of course, when you're of a certain age, learning rock lyrics is not always easy, and we look on as the group members scrutinize words with huge magnifying glasses and hold their ears as they listen to the loud originals. But, under the firm-but-fair direction of Bob Cilman, who's led the group for 25 years, these troupers slowly but surely rise to the occasion, delighted to have a purpose in life and as willing to have fun in the process as people one-quarter their age. Directed by Stephen Walker, "Young@Heart" the film is similarly slow getting going. Walker, a British TV documentary maker, narrates the film himself, and his overly chipper voice-over initially borders on being intrusive. But when the chorus starts to sing, when, for instance, animated 92-year-old former war bride Eileen Hall rips into the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go," none of that matters. Just as eye-popping are the videos for songs like David Bowie's "Golden Years" and the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" that veteran independent cinematographer Eddie Marritz shoots with a gleeful energy. The frame of "Young@- Heart" is a seven-week rehearsal period during which the chorus is expected to learn some difficult stuff, including Sonic Youth's unsettling "Schizophrenia" and Allen Toussaint's "Yes We Can Can," which uses the word "can" a memory-challenging 71 times. For a group whose members have trouble remembering the words to James Brown's "I Feel Good," this is quite an undertaking.
Alternating with rehearsal footage are home visits where we learn something of the personalities and the back stories of the choristers. This is especially effective when Cilman decides to bring back two former members who left because of declining health but are now well enough to rejoin. With an organization whose members are this old, the question of mortality is bound to come up, and that turns out to be one of the shocks as well as one of the graces of "Young@- Heart." When the chorus sings Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" to an audience at Hampshire Jail at a particularly emotional moment, many of the inmates are literally moved to tears. What we learn is that the age of these singers is not some glib contrivance but the heart of the matter. In a culture that venerates youth and considers aging the worst of all fates, to see these men and women having the time of their lives near the end of their lives couldn't be more refreshing. We want these wonderfully alive people to go on singing forever, most of all, perhaps, because we know there's no way they can. Review by Kenneth Turan, LA Times Movie Critic, kenneth.turan@latimes.com
The Little Red Truck
"Imagine sixty kids staging a full-scale musical in six days. "The Little Red Truck," a new, award-winning documentary film, records the emotional highs, lows and in-betweens of more than 250 kids in five communities when Missoula Children's Theatre, via its signature little red truck, comes to town.
It's magic and mayhem captured through the lens as the kids, under the direction of the two professional tour actor/directors who come with the touring truck, audition, rehearse, mess up, have the occasional meltdown, overcome personal obstacles, jump for joy, don costumes, and eventually grace the stage for a one-hour performance. But more than that, it's a laugh-out-loud and uplifting movie that's perfect for kids and their parents.
The film won "Best Feature Documentary" at the International Family Film Festival in Hollywood and has been awarded the Dove Foundation Family Approved Seal."
Kit Kittredge - Rated G - 101 minutes - Flat
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Considering that it is inspired by one of the dolls in the American Girl product line, "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" is some kind of a miracle: an actually good movie. I expected so much less. I was waiting for some kind of banal product placement, I suppose, and here is a movie that is just about perfect for its target audience, and more than that. It has a great look, engaging performances, real substance and even a few whispers of political ideas, all surrounding the freshness and charm of Abigail Breslin, who was 11 when it was filmed. The movie is set in Cincinnati at the dawn of the Great Depression; perfectly timed, it would appear, as we head into another one. Kit pounds furiously on the typewriter in her tree house, determined to become a Girl Reporter, while a big story is happening right downstairs in her family house: The mortgage is about to be foreclosed. Her dad (Chris O'Donnell) has lost his car dealership and gone to Chicago seeking work, her mom (Julia Ormond) is taking in boarders, and there's local hysteria about muggings and robberies allegedly committed by hobos. Kit actually meets a couple of hobos. Will (Max Thieriot) is about her age, and his sidekick Countee (Willow Smith) is a little younger. They live in the hobo camp down by the river, along with as nice a group of hobos as you'd ever want to meet. Kit tries selling their story and photos to the editor of the local paper (a snarling Wallace Shawn). No luck. But other adventures ensue: She adopts a dog, her mom acquires chickens, Kit sells the eggs, and the new boarders are a colorfully assorted lot. And she sees such unthinkable sights as neighbor's furniture being moved to the sidewalk by deputies. Will that happen at her address? The boarders include a magician (Stanley Tucci), a nurse (Jane Krakowski), the erratic driver (Joan Cusack) of a mobile library truck and assorted others, eventually including even a monkey. Kit's mom hides her treasures in a lock box, but it is stolen, and unmistakable clues point to the hobos. A footprint found under a window, for example, has a star imprint that exactly matches the boots found in Will's tent, and the sheriff names him the prime suspect. But hold on! Kit and her best friends Stirling and Ruthie (Zach Mills and Madison Davenport) develop another theory, which would clear Will and implicate someone (dramatically lowered voice) a lot ... closer to home. All of this (the missing loot, Kit's ambitions and Those Important Clues) are of course the very lifeblood of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books, and "Kit Kittredge" not only understands that genre but breathes life into it. This movie, intelligently and sincerely directed by Patricia Rozema ("Mansfield Park"), does not condescend. It does not cheapen or go for easy laughs. It is as serious about Kit as she is about herself, and doesn't treat her like some (indignant exclamation) dumb girl. If you have or know or can borrow a girl (or a boy) who collects the American Girl dolls, grab onto that child as your excuse to see this movie. You may enjoy it as much as they do -- maybe more, with its period costumes, settings and music. The kids may be astonished that banks actually foreclosed on people's homes in the old days (hollow laugh). And there may be a message lurking somewhere in the movie's tolerance of hobos. The American Girl dolls have already inspired TV movies about Molly, Felicity and Samantha. What's for sure is that if "Kit Kittredge" sets the tone for more upcoming American Girl movies, we can anticipate some wonderful family films. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
The Visitor - Rated PG-13 - 103 minutes - Flat
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So much film criticism focuses on directors that we sometimes forget what draws most people to the screen: the prospect of seeing an actor connect with a role and really live it. That connection can’t be willed, and it can empower an average performer to give an outstanding performance—how else could Jennifer Garner, as the yearning adoptive mother in Juno, steal scenes from a brilliant young brat like Ellen Page? Directors who understand how to handle actors often describe their job not as barking orders like Otto Preminger but as creating a work environment in which the actors can find their characters. Thomas McCarthy, a busy actor (he played the corrupt young Baltimore Sun reporter on the last season of HBO’s The Wire), has written and directed two features—The Station Agent (2003) and now The Visitor—and in each he’s excelled at pulling actors into his stories with roles written especially for them. This strategy has resulted in some truly memorable characters. Perversely, both movies are about men who can’t connect. Fin McBride, the brooding dwarf in The Station Agent, is so fed up with people’s humiliating reactions to him that when he unexpectedly inherits a disused railroad station in rural New Jersey, he retreats into it like a monk. Still the world dogs him: the local convenience store owner rudely snaps his picture, and the local librarian is so startled by him that she yelps and drops a stack of books. McCarthy wrote the role for Peter Dinklage, whom he’d directed in a play years earlier; even so, it required a strong acting commitment. “Dink is one of the funniest guys I know,” McCarthy told usedwigs.com. “We really had to strip him down. That’s tough for an actor, especially someone like Peter who has used his sense of humor to get through life. . . . [Fin] doesn’t want to be charming, he doesn’t want to be flirty, he doesn’t want to be sarcastic. He really just wants to be left alone.” Dinklage gives a remarkably controlled performance; there’s a lifetime of pain in his mild remark that he doesn’t like bars. McCarthy achieves a similar alchemy in The Visitor with Richard Jenkins, for whom he wrote the role of Walter Vale, a middle-aged economics professor grappling with the death of his concert pianist wife. Like Fin, Walter wants the world to go away: he blows off his students, zones out at departmental meetings, and listens to his wife’s CD while cooking spaghetti sauce to be eaten alone. When his Connecticut university sends him to New York to deliver a paper, he arrives at the apartment he and his wife kept there for years and finds an immigrant couple, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and Zainab (Danai Gurira), have been conned into renting the place. They quickly agree to clear out, but Walter takes pity on them and invites them to stay for the time being. Jenkins, a balding, bespectacled character actor perhaps best known as the ghostly father on Six Feet Under, has enjoyed a long Hollywood career playing dry, buttoned-down types—doctors, lawyers, executives—and he seizes on the role of Walter, a man no one seems to notice. “I understood this man,” Jenkins recently told the New York Times. “I understood his reluctance to reach out, to become part of things.” The first scene of the movie shows Walter taking piano lessons from a rather severe older woman, and afterward, when he politely tells her he’s going to end the lessons, there’s a beautifully played comic moment in which she admits he lacks a “natural gift” and offers to buy his piano. Later, as Walter grows more friendly with Tarek, a warmhearted Syrian percussionist, he discovers he has a talent for rhythm and begins experimenting with the djembe. Before long Tarek has him out in the park with an afternoon drum circle, incongruous at the funky gathering in his starchy suit and tie. Jenkins shows the man’s modesty and discomfort, but also his decency and, when events turn painful, his strength. The first time Jenkins saw the finished cut of The Visitor, he reportedly told McCarthy, “I’ve been waiting my whole career to do a movie like this.” The Visitor largely recycles the character dynamic of The Station Agent. Tarek isn’t far removed from Joe Oramos (Bobby Cannavale), the outgoing Cuban-American hot dog vendor who coaxes Fin out of his shell. And just as Fin endures the agonies of unrequited love for Olivia Harris (Patricia Clarkson), a troubled married woman who lives nearby, Walter falls in love with Mouna (Hiam Abbass), Tarek’s dignified and beautiful mother. Yet this time McCarthy allows his story to unfold into a political drama: Tarek is stopped by plainclothes policemen in the subway, busted as an illegal immigrant, and remanded to a detention center in Queens. Walter makes it a personal mission to free Tarek, hiring an immigration attorney and taking a leave of absence from his job to stay in New York. The irony is overwhelming and yet somehow muted: Walter Vale is learning to open himself up again in a country that’s closing itself down. Because Mouna and Zainab are both illegal immigrants, Walter is Tarek’s only visitor, and they nurse their friendship from opposite sides of a Plexiglas window. The detention center is a weirdly anonymous building adorned with the bland acronym UCC (United Correctional Corporation). “It doesn’t look like a prison,” says Mouna as she and Walter survey it from a distance. “I think that’s the idea,” he replies. The lack of connection with the outside world clearly preys on Tarek; as he explains to Walter, the lights are on 24 hours a day, and there’s no outdoor area for the 300 detainees, just a room with an open roof. When Walter brings notes from Mouna and Zainab, he has to hold them up against the window, modestly turning his head as Tarek reads. During one visit Tarek begs Walter to drum on the table for him: “Come on, I need some music, man!” Walter obliges, tapping out a beat on the narrow table they share, and Tarek joins in. I’m not surprised to learn that this element of the story also grew out of a personal connection. In his research for the movie McCarthy got involved with the Sojourners, an outreach program at Riverside Church in New York, and spent about a year visiting detainees at a center in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. One was a Nigerian man who’d been in detention for three and a half years and asked McCarthy to help process his deportation case so he could return to his native land. “I kept visiting him, trying to do what I could,” McCarthy told ifc.com. “You get very involved. I’d find myself visiting him on holidays, or leaving Manhattan early from work to go see him. You know, it’s someone you care about.” He might be speaking for Walter, but he might as easily be speaking for the viewer who forms an attachment to his characters. The best movies are like a visit you wish would never end. Review by J.R. Jones, chicagoreader.com
The Foot Fist Way - Rated R - 83 minutes - Flat
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Mix some "Bad Santa," with a splash of "Napoleon Dynamite" and shake it up with a whole lot of whoop ass and you've got one of the funniest martial arts movies since "They Call Me Bruce?” Despite its clunky title, The Foot Fist Way has plenty of moments of gut-busting humor. The title comes from the literal translation of tae kwon do, which is the milieu in which this agile low-budget comedy takes place. Danny McBride is hilarious as the strip-mall martial arts master Fred Simmons, an egomaniacal dolt of a man who is shockingly self-deluded, obnoxious and bullying, particularly with small children and women. His behavior often is hilarious but just as frequently cringe-inducing. The contrast between his moronic persona and the tenets of tae kwon do that he piously espouses — self-control, courtesy, integrity and indomitable spirit — makes for a clever farce. Its home-movie quality provides the ideal style to tell the story of this two-bit blowhard. Still, the film is drolly written, and the roughness around the edges is part of its charm. Writer/director/producer/co-star Jody Hill probably has a bright future making similarly amusing movies. Will Ferrell and his production company bought the film, which was made for a reported $70,000, and Ferrell has been busy promoting and publicizing it. Foot Fist is more original and comical than such low-budget sleeper hits as Napoleon Dynamite or Hot Fuzz, and its spoofing style is bound to appeal to fans of Ferrell's Anchorman or Talladega Nights. Simmons is a small-time, out-of-shape instructor who still brags about the championship he won in 1991 and idolizes a dopey martial arts/movie star named Chuck "the Truck" Wallace (Ben Best), a low-rent rock 'n' roll version of Chuck Norris. Simmons is married to the bimbo-esque Suzie (Mary Jane Bostic), who is ultra blonde, aggressively tanned and favors spandex. When Fred finds out she has casually cheated on him (a habit he refers to as her "ways"), he begins to fall apart. His inexplicably loyal students become fodder for his misplaced rage, and a young female practitioner has to endure his pathetic efforts to impress and romance her, which develop into disturbing stalker-like actions. When Fred takes two students and a creepily intense yellow-haired friend (hilariously played by director Hill) on a road trip to meet his idol, the movie begins to go a bit astray. But McBride has created such a vivid character that you forgive the movie its lapses. By the time he sells his fire-engine-red sports car to have enough money to lure Chuck the Truck to his suburban dojo, we actually feel for the foolish fellow. And when Chuck and Suzie hook up, as anyone watching could predict would happen, we actually find ourselves rooting for the idiotic Fred over those two lowlife louts. This is a really small film, shot in 19 days, and it's a little rough around the edges, but it's got a huge comic heart that's undeniable. Most notable is Danny McBride's performance as the brutal Mr. Simmons. This is one of those classic characters you could watch all day and never grow tired of. And Ben Best is hilarious as Chuck “"The Truck”" Wallace, an obvious Chuck Norris clone. If you like funny and if you like martial arts, then "“The Foot Fist Way"” is going to be right up your alley. A hit at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, The Foot Fist Way is a refreshingly silly and clever portrait of a strikingly daft and clueless man. Review By Claudia Puig, usatoday.com
Flight of the Red Balloon - NR - 115 minutes - Flat
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Paris (and France in general) tends to be a habitat seen in big sweeps and large outside shots, attesting to the ongoing American romanticizing of the City of Light. The Eiffel Tower looming large in the background, the stoic Arc de Triomphe, the rolling lawns in front of the Basilique du Sacre Coeur: However intimate the city's candor might be, film has always taken Paris in with its monuments, landmarks, and open spaces as pieces of a collective familiarity. With the exception of a lone, beautiful coda within the Musee d'Orsay, the very body responsible for the film's funding, Hou Hsiao-hsien's gorgeous Flight of the Red Balloon drifts away from these environs, making a film about Paris life that seems uninterested in Paris as a city. Based on, or perhaps just familiarized with, Albert Lamorisse's French children's classic The Red Balloon, Hsiao-hsien moves the focus from a child and his balloon to a child, his frazzled mom, and his new Chinese nanny, a young filmmaker on a student visa. In an odd act of attentiveness, the nanny, Song (a great Song Fang), begins to make a student film about the red balloon floating around her arondissement, co-starring her ward, Simon (Simon Iteanu). Explaining how she got the balloon to move exactly how she wanted, Song briefly talks about green screens and the pratfalls of modern, low-budget filmmaking, giving Hsiao-hsien a behind-the-scenes fantasia of sorts within his own film. Simon's father, a writer in self-imposed exile in Montreal, has only one interaction by phone, but his presence is aptly felt through Simon's mother's (Juliette Binoche) barbed interactions with her husband's friend and current tenant, Marc (Hippolyte Girardot). Binoche is a dream. Like the city in which the film is based, Hsiao-hsien has stripped Binoche of her token abilities: her dark hair mussed and badly dyed into a blonde mess, her usual role as center of gravity thrown into a state of utter upheaval, her coy beauty mutated into a palette of raw nerves. Yet, through this act of deviation, Binoche gives one of her best performances to date, at once completely spontaneous and thoughtfully patient. In a year brimming with great French films (Heartbeat Detector, The Duchess of Langelais), it's ironic that the most successful of them would come from the Chinese-born, Taiwan-educated Hsiao-hsien. Like Wong Kar-wai's first immersion into foreign language cinema, the English-tongued My Blueberry Nights, Hsiao-hsien continues to study the same tropes of his outstanding Chinese output: loneliness, isolation, stilted love. It also touches on the polarizing effect of city life and travel, a strong force in the master's 2005 tribute to Yasujiro Ozu, Caf Lumiere. But whereas Kar-wai's exercise coaxes out the director's inevitable faults, Balloon highlights Hsiao-hsien' staggering strengths, both aesthetically and technically speaking. Like the rest of Hsiao-hsien's oeuvre, his latest feels like the culmination of all his works beforehand. Working with the masterful cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing, Hsiao-hsien, who gave his actors full character histories but no written dialogue, delivers all the film's action in confined settings. A cramped, cluttered apartment, a darkened puppet theater, and the narrow streets of Paris managed to breed inspiration for Hsiao-hsien's actors. Shot in his patently-resplendent long takes, the aesthetic is seemingly unencumbered, but, coupled with Chu Shih Yi's gentle sound design, the images breathlessly unspool into suites of effortless intricacy. As Suzanne argues heatedly with Marc downstairs, Hsiao-hsien's camera wanders around the apartment as Song and Simon prepare for a mid-day snack and a blind tuner repairs Suzanne's piano. All the sounds and movements of the characters co-mingle, interact, climax, and then gently descend. You won't see anything as rapturous as this in any film this year. — Review by CHRIS CABIN, www.reel.com
Sex and the City - Rated R - 145 minutes - Flat
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The moment that Sex and the City truly arrives on the big screen is the big fight scene (you knew there'd be one, even if you haven't seen the trailers) between Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) and Mr. Big (Chris Noth) on the streets of the Big Apple. They were supposed to be getting married. He freaked out and ran (or, this being New York, was driven) away. Now he's doubled back. Carrie, a hellhound in Vivienne Westwood, advances on him with her bouquet. He recoils in horror and confusion. Petals and leaves fall in slow-motion. It's like a breakup directed by Sam Peckinpah.
It works because it's exactly what fans have come to expect of the popular HBO series that ran from 1998 to 2004. There are squabbles and tears, histrionic reactions that gradually subside into wound-licking, heartfelt confessions and clever keyboarding rhetoric; then the whole cycle repeats. Disciples of Jane Goodall could leave Gombe and the chimpanzees for someplace with more taxis and a better class of latte, and still pen sociological masterworks drawn from the lives of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte.
Of course, between the long, loving panoramic shots of the perfect penthouse apartment, the hunting and gathering of designer purses and no fewer than three fashion montages, it's a wonder there's any room for plot, let alone sex, in Sex and the City. That the movie manages to spend time in and out of bed with each of its four protagonists is a testament to writer/director Michael Patrick King, who keeps the action moving with the aplomb of a champion plate-spinner. It also doesn't hurt that the movie has a running time of two and a half hours, a length usually reserved for films whose focus is Oscars, not Oscar de la Renta.
Finally, there's the fact that the foursome is actually a gestalt, with sexy Samantha (Kim Cattrall) as the id, practical Charlotte (Kristin Davis) as superego and writer Carrie as the overarching ego. There's also Cynthia Nixon as Miranda, the do-it-all/have-it-all working mother, whose exclusion from Freud's theory must have been some kind of slip.
The story begins four years after the series ended, which means Carrie and friends are firmly in their forties and, thankfully, not afraid to admit it. Carrie has even been given an assignment by her editor at Vogue (a nice cameo by a tough-talking Candice Bergen) to write about her impending nuptials with Big from the point of view of "the last single girl in New York." Since Big's proposal was an off-hand "I wouldn't mind being married to you ..." we can sense an impending, Peckinpah-like collision of wedding planning priorities between the two lovebirds.
Meanwhile, Miranda dumps her man after he admits to a one-night stand, Samantha tries to make monogamy work with a self-obsessed actor in Los Angeles - this also allows for many high-pitched-shrieky reunions every time she unexpectedly arrives in New York - and Charlotte worries her marriage is too blissful to be true. We should all have such anxieties.
But the real star is Conspicuous Consumption, making an early entrance when Carrie describes her dream apartment as "real estate heaven" before asking: "If you live here, what is there to fight about?" Closet space, it turns out, although Big quickly rectifies that by installing a walk-in with more square footage than most West-Side walkups.
After the wedding collapses like so much meringue, the four friends engage in the ritual of "let's not waste a pre-paid honeymoon vacation in Mexico," one of several instances in which children, lovers and responsibilities are neatly forgotten for as long as the script demands.
Carrie then hires a personal assistant played by Jennifer Hudson, last (and only ever) seen as the ingenue in Dreamgirls. Hudson represents the new generation of New York women on the make, arriving from Missouri already possessed of insider knowledge, a company called Bag Borrow or Steal that she describes as "Netflix for purses." (I thought it was the best joke in the movie, too, but it turns out to be an actual enterprise.)
From here it's just a matter of bringing everyone back to a happy place, which means each character has to re-learn something about herself that we knew before the movie even began. Nevertheless, it's supremely satisfying, and a guilty pleasure to boot, especially when watching a character scream "My very own Louis Vuitton!" with more heartfelt emotion than any protestation of mere romantic love in the movie so far. Sex and the City continues to peddle its message of true love, but since "happily ever after" doesn't come with a price tag, it would like us to remember that the next most important thing is to accessorize. Chris Knight, National Post
GONZO: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson - Rated R - 120 minutes - Flat
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In all the memories gathered together in "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," there was one subject I found conspicuously missing: The fact of the man's misery. Did he never have a hangover? The film finds extraordinary access to the people in his life, but not even from his two wives do we get a description I would dearly love to read, on what he was like in the first hour or two after he woke up. He was clearly, deeply, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and after a stupor-induced sleep he would have awakened in a state of withdrawal. He must have administered therapeutic dozes of booze or pills or something to quiet the tremors and the dread. What did he say at those times? How did he behave? Are the words "fear and loathing" autobiographical?
Of course, perhaps Thompson was immune. One of the eyewitnesses to his life says in wonderment, "You saw the stuff go in and there was no discernible effect." I don't think I believe that. If there was no discernible effect, how would you describe his behavior? If he had been sober all his life, would he have hunted wild pigs with a machine gun? Thompson was the most famous (or notorious) inebriate of his generation, but perhaps he really was one of those rare creatures who had no hangovers, despite the debaucheries of the day(s) before. How much did he consume? A daily bottle of bourbon, plus wine, beer, pills of every description.
The bottom line is, he got away with it, right up until his suicide, which he himself scripted and every one of his friends fully expected. As a journalist he got away with murder. He reported that during a presidential primary Edward Muskie ingested Ibogaine, a psychoactive drug administered by a "mysterious Brazilian doctor," and this information, which was totally fabricated, was actually picked up and passed along as fact. Thompson's joke may have contributed to Muskie's angry tantrums during the 1972 Florida primary. No other reporter could have printed such a lie, but Thompson was shielded by his legend: He could print anything. "Of all the correspondents," says Frank Mankiewicz, McGovern's 1972 campaign manager, "he was the least factual, but the most accurate."
He was an explosive, almost hypnotic, writer, with a savage glee in his prose. I remember eagerly opening a new issue of Rolling Stone in the 1970s and devouring his work. A great deal of it was untrue, but it dealt in a kind of exalted super-truth, as when he spoke of Richard Nixon the vampire roaming the night in Washington. Thompson had never heard of objectivity. In 1972 he backed George McGovern as the Democratic nominee, and no calumny was too vile for him to attribute to McGovern's opponents in both parties. I suppose readers were supposed to know that and factor it into the equation.
This documentary by Alex Gibney ("Taxi to the Dark Side," "No End in Sight") is remarkable, first of all, for reminding us how many pots Hunter dipped a spoon in. He rode with the Hells' Angels for a year. Ran for sheriff of Pitkin County and lost, but only by 204-173. Covered the 1972 and 1976 presidential primaries in a way that made him a co-candidate (in the sense of co-dependent). Had a baffling dual personality, so that such as McGovern, Jimmy Buffet, Tom Wolfe and his wives and son remember him fondly, but could also be "absolutely vicious."
He taught himself to write by typing Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" again and again, we're told. How many times? we ask ourselves skeptically. Was that part of the fantastical legend? Nobody in the film was around while he was doing it. He became famous for writing about "the Edge" in his Hells' Angels' book--that edge of speed going around a curve which you could approach, but never cross without wiping out and killing yourself. He did a lot of edge-riding on his motorcycle, and never wiped out. He said again and again that the way he chose to die was by his own hand, with a firearm, while he was still at the top. He died that way, using one of his 22 firearms, but "he was nowhere near the top," says Sondi Wright, his first wife.
He started to lose it after Africa, says Jann Wenner, who ran his stuff in Rolling Stone. He went to Zaire at great expense to cover the Rumble in the Jungle for the magazine, got hopelessly stoned, missed the fight (while reportedly in the hotel pool), and never filed a story. "After Africa," says Sondi, "he just couldn't write. He couldn’t piece it together." He did some more writing, of course, such as a heartfelt piece after 9/11. But he had essentially disappeared into his legend, as the outlaw of Woody Creek, blasting away with his weapons, making outraged phone calls, getting impossibly high. Certainly he made an impression on his time like few other journalists ever do; the comparison would be with H. L. Mencken.
This film gathers interviews from a wide and sometimes surprising variety of people (Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Hells' Angel Sonny Barger). It has home movies, old photos, TV footage, voice recordings, excerpts from file about Thompson). It is narrated by Johnny Depp, mostly through readings from Thompson's work. It is all you could wish for in a doc about the man. But it leaves you wondering, how was it that so many people liked this man who does not seem to have liked himself? And what about the hangovers?
The Wackness - Rated R - 120 minutes - Flat
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"The Wackness," which is set in 1994, contains so many drugs, it could have been made in the 1970s, along with "Panic in Needle Park" and other landmarks of the psychotropic generation. The big difference is that drugs have progressed since then from cutting-edge material to background music. Both its hero, who has just graduated from high school, and his shrink, 40 years his senior, are so constantly stoned that pot and pills are daily, even hourly, fuel. What saves this movie, which won this year's audience award at Sundance, from being boring are performances by two actors who see a chance to go over the top and aren't worried about the fall on the other side. Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is a college-bound student who deals bushels of marijuana from a battered ice-cream push-cart from which no one even attempts to purchase ice cream. Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), his psychiatrist, accepts payment in grams, and enthusiastically counsels Luke that he needs to get laid. Only when Luke tries to fill the prescription with the doc's stepdaughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby from "Juno") do ethics come into question. Peck's performance, for that matter, could have been inspired by Ellen Page's work in "Juno," assuming he saw the film once and wasn't paying attention. He is cool beyond cool, except when his heart is broken, which happens after he makes the mistake of telling Stephanie he loves her. This is, like, so not cool. Meanwhile, Squires' own marriage with Kristin (Famke Janssen) is on the rocks, although both are so spaced out that they don't much care. That leaves space in the story for one meaningful relationship, which is between Luke and Squires. The Luke character we've seen before, usually not played this well. The psychiatrist is more original. Kingsley, at first unrecognizable with lanky locks and an outdated goatee, is a seriously addicted man, which he must know better than anybody. There's no evidence he has any clients other than Luke, and much of the time he's asking Luke for help. His belief system seems founded on the Beat Generation, and he's acting out his own desires through the younger man. He wants -- a laundry list. He wants to be younger, more potent, happily married. He wants to score with hippie chicks (one is played in the movie by Mary-Kate Olsen, who is a superb example of what he has in mind as a hippie chick). He wants to be loved. He wants to love. Everything going wrong in Luke's life right now has been going wrong in the doctor's life for 40 years. It's impossible to not pity this man and carry a reluctant affection for him. He's so screwed up. As a smart, addicted, self-analyzing, secular Jewish intellectual, he could be born of Philip Roth's nightmares. Luke, however, appears to be a drug-abusing slacker, but is, in fact, an ambitious drug-abusing slacker, who thinks he might study psychiatry. He's in inner turmoil because of problems at home, where the best-laid plans of his father have run ashore, and the family is being evicted. One motive for Luke's drug-selling spree is to bail out his dad, although it appears he would have to turn over the national product of Colombia to succeed. There's an undeniable pleasure in wallowing in other people's seamy, if entertaining, problems. Even Dr. Squires' descent into despair is accompanied by one-liners and a great soundtrack. (Luke, so retro he's still into cassettes.) Toward the end, when Luke summons the nerve to confess what he truly believes, has a kind of triumph, heavily laden, though it comes with qualifiers and apologies. It takes a certain heroism to admit to high feelings and noble instincts of the heart. Drugs are supposed to make that unnecessary, so Luke scores more than he realizes. As for the doctor, he achieves all of the benefits of committing suicide, yet suffers none of the drawbacks. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Brideshead Revisited - Rated PG-13 - 133 minutes - Scope
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"Brideshead Revisited" is a museum piece, perhaps the most famous tale of isolation and stunted emotion around. It's a fragile story that requires attentive direction, for any false move in interpretation will result in a complete dramatic malfunction. Facing incredible odds against it, this pass at conquering “Brideshead” is a worthy offering to the period-piece gods, presenting British aristocracy with the perfect edge of contempt and illicit sexual behavior shaped with the true angle of guilt. Away from his stuffy, loveless home for the first time, Charles (Matthew Goode) is off to Oxford, where he encounters all sorts of eccentric, intellectual types, including Sebastian (Ben Whishaw). Accepting Sebastian’s invitation to visit his family’s estate, “Brideshead,” Charles is immediately taken with the ornate, cathedral-like castle, and even more so with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). While the siblings are trapped under the control of their domineering, staunchly Catholic mother (Emma Thompson), Charles remains fascinated with the family, soon finding himself caught up in their abusive, controlling ways, patiently waiting for his chance to steal Julia away. Based in the illustrious 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh, “Brideshead” has been put through the adaptation wringer a few times, most notably a 1981 English mini-series starring Jeremy Irons as Charles. It’s an epic tale of psychological erosion pushed behind the icy glass of period-specific emotional withdrawal and, for this story, religious authority. It’s a narrative that twists throughout time and location, requiring a steady directorial pulse to keep it stimulating and dramatically rewarding. Filmmaker Julian Jarrold, having worked his way through a similar tea-n-disgrace story with last year’s engaging “Becoming Jane,” takes his work on “Brideshead” very seriously, placing immense care in every step of the story. It’s not a directorial job for Jarrold as much as the role of a lion tamer, whipping back a hungry legion of period storytelling proclivities that have sunk lesser pictures. No doubt, “Brideshead” is the Elvis Presley of English misery, trumping its yarn of mournful unrequited love with an even heavier dose of religious dynamite. It’s a perfect storm of brusque drama, and Jarrold juggles the moods and fangs of the material with expert efficiency. Of course, some corners are cut here, as expected. The mini-series took 11 hours to explore the finer edges of the center tragedy, while this film production is only permitted two and some change. I feel the biggest piece missing from “Brideshead” is Charles’s infatuation with the estate itself; a concentrated point of the story that the picture has little interest in discussing beyond starry, art-history gazes and interior urges to return. Also, the film’s second half requires a specific communication of time passage that never settles satisfactorily. It’s a testament to Jarrold’s passionate work that these are the few complaints by film’s end. What “Brideshead” succeeds at is evoking a lustful air of desire, notably between Charles and Julia, but also within Sebastian, who indulges Charles’s friendship to locate a romantic entry point. Sexuality lunges out of the script, with short bursts of lovemaking and forbidden passions, greatly enhancing the iron fist of faith that permeates the drama, confusing the characters, some to a point of dementia. The performances are top-tier all around, with special attention paid to Thompson’s sublimely icy matriarchal veneer and Atwell’s stunning metamorphosis into the picture’s forbidden fruit. While most films of this ilk tend to rest among the finer details of it all, “Brideshead” wishes to tell a marathon story of betrayal and the vagaries of fate. It’s a convincing potion, and while the narrative is missing a few notes in the overall orchestration, Jarrold still manages to piece together a haunting motion picture of unique cinema accomplishment. Review By Brian Orndorf, filmjerk.com
Man on Wire - Rated PG-13 - 94 minutes - Flat
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On the morning of Aug. 7, 1974, after months of preparation and years of dreaming, a French daredevil named Philippe Petit stepped into the sky above Lower Manhattan. For almost 45 minutes he ambled back and forth on a metal cable strung between the towers of the World Trade Center, a feat of illegal tightrope walking that, according to a New York Police Department sergeant who recounted Mr. Petit’s act of physical poetry in dry press-conference prose, would more aptly be described as dancing. For many years after, Mr. Petit’s stunt was a cherished footnote in the annals of New York history, one of the touchstones of a crazy, awful, glittering era in the life of the city. The destruction of the twin towers in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, revived the memory of that earlier aesthetic assault on the buildings, which is now the subject of “Man on Wire,” James Marsh’s thorough, understated and altogether enthralling documentary. Wisely, Mr. Marsh, who based his film on a book Mr. Petit published in 2002, never alludes to Sept. 11. That would have been both distracting and redundant, since it’s impossible, while watching a movie so intimate in its attention to the towers, not to be haunted by thoughts of their fate. But it is also worth recalling that the trade center inspired more love posthumously than while it stood. Mr. Petit was an exception. A zealous, daring wire walker — the French word funambule is a more lyrical, as well as a somewhat more ridiculous-sounding term — he conceived a passion for the structures even before they were built. As he recalls it (and as Mr. Marsh imagines the scene in one of many witty, unobtrusive re-enactments), the young Mr. Petit was flipping through a magazine at a doctor’s office when he saw an article about plans to construct the two tallest skyscrapers in the world side by side at the bottom of Manhattan. In his mind, and then in a series of sketches and diagrams, he drew a simple line connecting the buildings and imagined himself perched atop it. What kind of person would think of such a thing? How would he go about accomplishing it? Why? Those are the questions that preoccupy Mr. Marsh, whose earlier films include the semidocumentary “Wisconsin Death Trip” and the fictional feature “The King.” The first question is answered largely by Mr. Petit’s own testimony. In his 50s, he is elfin and energetic, a beguiling combination of showboat, idealist and con man. And in his early, outlaw years, before the twin towers walk brought him fame and a measure of legitimacy, he combined an exalted sense of artistic mission with a street criminal’s sense of serious mischief. Accordingly, “Man on Wire” is constructed like a heist movie, in the manner of “Rififi” or the revived “Ocean’s Eleven” franchise. Though Mr. Petit was alone on the cable that August morning, his walk in the sky was the result of a conspiracy of true believers and casual adventurers. In his two previous acts of guerrilla funambulism — at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris and on the Harbor Bridge in Sydney — he relied on the logistical and moral support of several friends, including his lover, Annie Allix, and his faithful sidekick, Jean-Louis Blondeau. In interviews, they and some of Mr. Petit’s other confederates — including two American goofballs and Barry Greenhouse, a flamboyant insurance executive who served as the all-important inside man — reconstruct their project, which they referred to at the time as “the coup,” in fascinating detail. There were engineering problems and also challenges that seem to belong to the world of espionage, as well as the inevitable tensions that arise when a group of people pursue a dangerous goal. Why did they do it? Rather than risking banality by addressing this question head-on, Mr. Marsh allows the answer to be at once self-evident and profoundly mysterious. A work of art is its own explanation, and “Man on Wire” leaves no doubt that Mr. Petit’s coup deserves to be called art. Mr. Blondeau, a sensitive and cerebral foil to the impish Mr. Petit, chokes up when he recalls watching his friend step out over the abyss. “The important thing is that we did it,” he says. And without making any grandiose claims, this lovely, touching film demonstrates that the World Trade Center sky walk was an important event. The proof is in the emotions — amusement, amazement, awe — evoked by those images of a tiny human figure balancing above a void. Also gratitude. It is easy to imagine that, in contemplating the scale and solidity of those brand-new towers, Mr. Petit saw them at least partly as the vehicle of his own immortality (whether or not he survived the crossing). No one looking up at the New York sky on a hazy morning 34 years ago and seeing a man on a wire could have suspected that the reverse would turn out to be true. Review by A.O. Scott, movies.nytimes.com
Encounters at the End of the World - Rated G - 99 minutes - Flat
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Read the title of "Encounters at the End of the World" carefully, for it has two meanings. As he journeys to the South Pole, which is as far as you can get from everywhere, Werner Herzog also journeys to the prospect of man's oblivion. Far under the eternal ice, he visits a curious tunnel whose walls have been decorated by various mementos, including a frozen fish that is far away from its home waters. What might travelers from another planet think of these souvenirs, he wonders, if they visit long after all other signs of our civilization have vanished? Herzog has come to live for a while at the McMurdo Research Station, the largest habitation on Antarctica. He was attracted by underwater films taken by his friend Henry Kaiser, which show scientists exploring the ocean floor. They open a hole in the ice with a blasting device, then plunge in, collecting specimens, taking films, nosing around. They investigate an undersea world of horrifying carnage, inhabited by creatures so ferocious, we are relieved they are too small to be seen. And also by enormous seals who sing to one another. In order not to limit their range, Herzog observes, the divers do not use a tether line, so they must trust themselves to find the hole in the ice again. I am afraid to even think about that. Herzog is a romantic wanderer, drawn to the extremes. He makes as many documentaries as fiction films, is prolific in the chronicles of his curiosity and here moseys about McMurdo, chatting with people who have chosen to live here in eternal day or night. They are a strange population. One woman likes to have herself zipped into luggage, and performs this feat on the station's talent night. One man was once a banker and now drives an enormous bus. A pipefitter matches the fingers of his hands together to show that the second and third are the same length -- genetic evidence, he says, that he is descended from Aztec kings. But I make the movie sound like a travelogue or an exhibit of eccentrics, and it is a poem of oddness and beauty. Herzog is like no other filmmaker, and to return to him is to be welcomed into a world vastly larger and more peculiar than the one around us. The underwater photography alone would make a film, but there is so much more. Consider the men who study the active volcanoes of Antarctica, and sometimes descend into volcanic fumes that open to the surface, although they must take care, Herzog observes in his wondering, precise narration, not to be doing so when the volcano erupts. It happens that there is another movie opening today in Chicago that also has volcanic tubes ("Journey to the Center of the Earth"). Do not confuse the two. These men play with real volcanoes. They also lead lives revolving around monster movies on video, and a treasured ice-cream machine and a string band concert from the top of a Quonset hut during the eternal day. And they have modern conveniences of which Herzog despairs, like an ATM machine, in a place where the machine, the money inside it and the people who use it, must all be air-lifted in. Herzog loves these people, it is clear, because like himself they have gone to such lengths to escape the mundane and test the limits of the extraordinary. But there is a difference between them and Timothy Treadwell, the hero of "Grizzly Man," Herzog's documentary about a man who thought he could live with bears and not be eaten, and was mistaken. The difference is that Treadwell was a foolish romantic, and these men and women are in this god-forsaken place to extend their knowledge of the planet and of the mysteries of life and death itself. Herzog's method makes the movie seem like it is happening by chance, although chance has nothing to do with it. He narrates as if we're watching movies of his last vacation -- informal, conversational, engaging. He talks about people he met, sights he saw, thoughts he had. And then a larger picture grows inexorably into view. McMurdo is perched on the frontier of the coming suicide of the planet. Mankind has grown too fast, spent too freely, consumed too much, and the ice cap is melting, and we shall all perish. Herzog doesn't use such language, of course; he is too subtle and visionary. He is nudged toward his conclusions by what he sees. In a sense, his film journeys through time as well as space, and we see what little we may end up leaving behind us. Nor is he depressed by this prospect, but only philosophical. We came, we saw, we conquered, and we left behind a frozen fish. His visit to Antarctica was not intended, he warns us at the outset, to take footage of "fluffy penguins." But there are some penguins in the film, and one of them embarks on a journey that haunts my memory to this moment, long after it must have ended. Note: Herzog dedicated this film to me. I am deeply moved and honored. The letter I wrote to him from the 2007 Toronto Film Festival is at rogerebert.com. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Henry Poole is Here - Rated PG - 99 minutes - Scope
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"Henry Poole Is Here" achieves something that is uncommonly difficult. It is a spiritual movie with the power to emotionally touch believers, agnostics and atheists -- in that descending order, I suspect. It doesn't say that religious beliefs are real. It simply says that belief is real. And it's a warm-hearted love story. It centers on a man named Henry Poole (Luke Wilson), who has only one problem when he moves into a house. He is dying. Then he acquires another problem. His neighbor, Esperanza Martinez (Adrianna Barrazza), sees the face of Jesus Christ in a stain on his stucco wall. Henry Poole doesn't see the face, and indeed neither do we most of the time, even if we squint. It's a hit-or-miss sort of thing. Wilson plays Henry as hostile and depressed. Well, he has much to be depressed about. "We hardly ever see this disease in the States," the doctor tells him. "It steamrolls through your system." Patience (Rachel Seiferth), the nearly blind checkout girl at the supermarket, gives him dietary hints when she notices he buys mostly vodka and frozen pizza. Although her glasses are half an inch thick, she's observant: "Why are you sad and angry all the time?" Henry starts hearing voices in his backyard. There is a rational reason for this. He is being secretly recorded by Millie (Morgan Lily), the 5-year-old who lives next door on the other side from Esperanza. Millie's mother is the lovely Dawn (Radha Mitchell), who apologizes for her daughter, brings cookies, also notices how sad and angry Henry is. He is especially angry with Esperanza, warning her to stay out of his yard and stop praying to his bad stucco job. But she has seen Jesus, and cannot be stopped. She brings in Father Salazar (George Lopez), who explains that the church does not easily declare miracles, but keeps an open mind. There are more details, which I must not reveal, including certain properties of the wall. I will observe that the director, Mark Pellington, uses some of the most subtle special effects you've probably seen for some time, to fine-tune the illusion that the face of Christ is really there, or really not there. I will now think of this movie every time I drive through the Fullerton Avenue underpass of the Kennedy Exp., where since April 2005, people have said they can see the Virgin Mary in a wall stain. The thing is, certain miraculous events take place, and the people involved believe it is because they touched Henry's wall. Patience the checkout girl even quotes the formidable intellectual Noam Chomsky, who, she informs Henry, said some things cannot be explained by science. One critic of this film believes it is anti-science and pounds you over the head to believe. Not at all. It is simply that Chomsky is right, as any scientist will tell you. What do I believe? I believe science can eventually explain everything, but only if it gets a whole lot better than it is now and discovers realms we do not even suspect. You could call such a realm God. You could, of course, call it anything you wanted; it wouldn't matter to the realm. Another critic, or maybe it is the same critic, believes the movie is a Hollywood ploy to reach the Christian market. Not at all. Esperanza sees Jesus because the face of Jesus is ready in her mind, supplied by holy cards and paintings. You might see the face of Uncle Sam. No one knows what Jesus looked like. It is also strange that the Virgin's appearances always mirror her holy card image. People from biblical lands at that time would have been a good deal darker and shorter. The movie gets that right: The image is so low on the wall that Jesus must have stood less than 5 feet tall. But I stray, and I do injustice to this film. I fell for it. I believe the feelings between Henry and Dawn. I care about their tenderness and loneliness. I think Millie is adorable. I think Father Salazar has his head on straight. I love Esperanza's great big heart. And I especially admire the way that Henry sticks to his guns. He doesn't believe there's a face on his stucco, and that's that. And no, he doesn't undergo a deathbed conversion. That's because ... but find out for yourself. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
The Last Mistress - NR - 114 minutes - Flat
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The first time you see the courtesan called La Vellini, she’s stretched out on a divan and wearing a smile, or perhaps a scowl. It’s hard to tell with this woman, whose lips restlessly tremble and twist with rage and pleasure. She’s dressed like the supine subject of Goya’s painting “The Clothed Maja,” which, like its sister image, “The Nude Maja,” was condemned as indecent by the Spanish Inquisition. To look at the figure on screen writhing like a pampered cat is to understand why those paintings made some observers uneasy. “The Last Mistress” is unlikely to make anyone truly uneasy, because its deepest provocations — the casting of Asia Argento as La Vellini aside — occur at the level of narrative rather than through its style. Written and directed by Catherine Breillat, it relates the unhinged affair between La Vellini and Ryno de Marigny (Fu’ad Aït Aattou, a luscious newcomer), a penniless nobleman and libertine somewhat her junior. Opening in 1835 and based on a novel by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly from 1851, the story is cruel and enthralling. Much of it transpires in flashbacks, sometimes in bed or the equivalent: a tiger-skin rug, a patch of desert sand. Like all of Ms. Breillat’s films, it is also an emotional, often raw inquiry into troubling, cursed desire. The film’s original French title, “Une Vieille Maîtresse” (“an old mistress”), is not as sexy as the new one but fits the story better. La Vellini, a Spaniard living in Paris with her decrepit though titled husband, Sir Reginald (Nicholas Hawtrey), is already well seasoned when she meets Ryno, who has recently returned from licentious doings abroad. The future lovers become aware of each other when a mutual friend points out La Vellini enjoying some ice cream in a park. Ryno loudly mocks her as “an ugly mutt,” earning him a dark look from the object of his scorn. From the violence with which she began licking her ice cream in his direction — Ms. Breillat abhors subtlety — he should have known what he was in for. A passion is born, followed by rivulets of blood, near and decisive death, a torrent of words, carnality. The story opens on the eve of Ryno’s wedding to a delectable moneyed aristocrat, Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida, suitably decorative if scarcely virginal). He’s ready to settle down, or maybe just settle. One evening Hermangarde’s grandmother, the Marquise de Flers (Claude Sarraute, wonderfully sly and twinkling), confronts Ryno about his scandalous reputation. Confessing all, he relates the highs and bitter lows of his affair with La Vellini, which unfolds as a series of overheated, assaultive (rarely tender) encounters between erotic equals. The two are duelists in a continuing war — one monitored by society busybodies humorously played by Yolande Moreau and Michael Lonsdale — perhaps not of their making. Ms. Breillat’s explorations of desire and pleasure are so far from the antiseptic world of most screen depictions as to seem far out. In truth she’s just fearless, determined to show what others keep hidden — the good, the bad, the tumescent, the fluid — so she can keep puzzling through her ideas. “The Last Mistress” isn’t as graphic as some of her other films, notably “Romance,” which features full-frontal and then some. The sex in this film is far from explicit, though it features geometric formations that may be better suited for Kama Sutra students, or at least the limber. What’s explicit here is ravenous passion and the depiction of desire as a creating, destroying force that invades the very flesh. It’s terribly French. It’s also gloriously unpredictable, even if the ways in which Ms. Breillat frames and puts together scenes tend to be less than surprising. A stubborn individualist, she is also a generally unremarkable, even on occasion awkward stylist, though one sensitive to color. You gasp at her ideas and words, not her setups and camera moves. Set amid the rarefied realm of the French aristocracy — Louis-Philippe, the last king to rule France, sits on the throne — the film has many of the trappings of a conventional costume drama, from the rustling gowns to the glowing candelabra. Everything from the costumes to the cinematography works to advance the story. Everything, that is, except La Vellini, who, like Goya’s Maja, rocks her world by the public spectacle of her desire. Like all the unruly women who populate Ms. Breillat’s films, La Vellini rubs hard against the grain. She’s the fly in the ointment, the stick in the eye, and it’s her howls, her spit and her fury that keep everything off kilter, disturbing the peace, its keepers and the narrative flow. Ms. Breillat reserves her most adoring close-ups for Mr. Aattou, a delicate beauty with feminine pillowy lips. (She loves her boys.) But she never denies Ms. Argento, who hurtles into her scenes, at times literally, gobbling up a lot of space. She’s playing a woman whom others deride as a creature — as if she were a beast. In truth, La Vellini is a woman of pleasure, and Ms. Breillat makes certain her cup runneth over, furiously. Review by Manhola Dargis, movies.nytimes.com
Traitor - Rated PG-13 - 114 minutes - Scope
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"Traitor" weaves a tangled web of conspiracy and intrigue, crosses politics with thriller elements, and never quite answers its central question: In the war between good and evil, how many good people is it justifiable for the good guys to kill? Maybe that question has no answer. It is probably not "none." The film stars Don Cheadle, an actor who excels at inner conflict, as Samir, born in Sudan, later an undercover Special Op for the United States. As a youth, he witnessed his father killed by a car bomb. For me, at least, it was not immediately clear who was responsible for the bomb, although his father was a committed Muslim. Was he killed by Muslim haters, or by Muslims who opposed his politics? That ambiguity works in the film's favor. As Samir enlists on the American side and then is seen as a remarkably effective agent for terrorist jihadists, we are kept wondering where his true loyalties lie. The film makes it a point that Samir is devout in the practice of his religion. He often quotes the Koran, is observant, seems to have true spirituality in his soul. He is not pretending. Of course the great majority of Muslims are against terrorism and any form of murder. Others, as we have seen, are not. In paying attention to this division, "Traitor" establishes the mystery of which side Samir is a traitor to. Is he a double agent for the U.S., or a triple agent? The film, directed by Jeffrey Nachmanoff, written by Nachmanoff and (the) Steve Martin, uses locations in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and America, and provides an inside view of both the jihadists and a special FBI counter-terrorism unit. Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough play FBI agents who disagree about the handling of the case; Jeff Daniels is a CIA agent who approaches the plot obliquely. Said Taghmaoui is very effective as Omar, leader of a terrorist group which has grave suspicions about Samir, until Samir is able to disprove them by being jailed, escaping with Omar, providing bomb-building expertise, and creating a chilling scenario for a terrorist attack in the United State. The movie proceeds quickly, seems to know its subject matter, is fascinating in its portrait of the inner politics and structure of the terrorist group, and comes uncomfortably close to reality. But what holds it together is the Cheadle character, whose true motives remain opaque to the terrorists, the Americans, and the audience. As we have learned from the spies of Graham Greene and John LeCarre, and from countless police movies, to be effective an undercover agent must to a considerable degree cooperate with those he is targeting. Sometimes transference takes place. He begins to think like his enemies, to sympathize with them. Since working convincingly for either side requires a capacity for the fanatical, agents can grow confused about where their loyalties lie. It is this confusion that makes "Traitor" effective, except for those who like their moral choices laid out in black and white. That's what makes the film's pure thriller elements work so well. Even in violent action scenes, the participants are forced to make instant decisions, or discoveries, about loyalties. We know from other movies how the violence will unfold, but neither we nor the combatants are sure which side everybody is on. That is true even of the urbane Omar, who is definitely a jihadist, but whose motives and their effect are paradoxical.
Don Cheadle is such a good actor. If he were more of a showboat, he would be a bigger star. But he remains the go-to man for a film like this. Except in his work like thE "Ocean's" pictures or his heroic work in "Hotel Rwanda," we cannot often be certain what we are to think of his characters. He effortlessly seems too intelligent, too complex, to be easily categorized. Perhaps my doubt about the motives of Samir's father's killers was due only to confusion on my part. Even so, who would witness the death of his father by a bomb, and then be driven to become a builder of bombs? And why? It is an uncertainty potent enough to drive the entire movie. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Tell No One - NR - 125 minutes - Scope
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"Tell No One" will play as a terrific thriller for you, if you meet it halfway. You have to be willing to believe. There will be times you think it's too perplexing, when you're sure you're witnessing loose ends. It has been devised that way, and the director knows what he's doing. Even when it's baffling, it's never boring. I've heard of airtight plots. This one is not merely airtight, but hermetically sealed. The set-up is the simple part. We meet a married couple, sweethearts since childhood: Alex (Francois Cluzet) and Margot (Marie-Josee Croze). They go skinny-dipping in a secluded pond and doze off on the raft. They have a little quarrel, and Margot swims ashore. Alex hears a scream. He swims to the dock, climbs the ladder and is knocked unconscious. Flash-forward eight years. Alex is a pediatrician in a Paris hospital. He has never remarried and still longs for Margot. Two bodies are found buried in the forest where it is believed she was murdered, and the investigation is reopened. Although Margot's case was believed solved, suspicion of Alex has never entirely died out. He was hit so hard before falling back into the water that he was in a coma for three days. How did he get back on the dock? Now the stage is set for a dilemma that resembles in some ways "The Fugitive." Evidence is found that incriminates Alex: a murder weapon, for example, in his apartment. There is the lockbox that contains suspicious photographs and a shotgun tied to another murder. Alex is tipped off by his attorney (Nathalie Baye) and flees out the window of his office at the hospital just before the cops arrive. "You realize he just signed his own confession?" a cop says to the lawyer. Alex is in very good shape. He runs and runs, pursued by the police. It is a wonderfully photographed chase, including a dance across both lanes of an expressway. His path takes him through Clignancourt, the labyrinthine antiques market and into the mean streets on the other side. He shares a Dumpster with a rat. He is helped by a crook he once did a favor for; the crook has friends who seem to be omnipresent. Ah, but already I've left out a multitude of developments. Alex has been electrified by cryptic e-mail messages that could only come from Margot. Is she still alive? He needs to elude the cops long enough to make a rendezvous in a park. And still I've left out so much -- but I wouldn't want to reveal a single detail that would spoil the mystery. "Tell No One" was directed and co-scripted by Guillaume Canet, working with Harlan Coben, the American author of the novel which inspired it. It contains a rich population of characters, but has been so carefully cast that we're never confused. There are: Alex's sister (Marina Hands); her lesbian lover (Kristin Scott Thomas); the rich senator, whose obsession is race horses (Jean Rochefort); Margot's father (Andre Dussollier); the police captain who alone believes Alex is innocent (Francois Berleand); the helpful crook (Gilles Lellouche), and the senator's son (Guillaume Canet himself). Also a soft-porn fashion photographer, a band of vicious assassins, street thugs, and on and on. And the movie gives full weight to these characters; they are necessary and handled with care. If you give enough thought to the film, you'll begin to realize that many of the key roles are twinned, high and low. There are two cops closely on either side of retirement age. Two attractive brunettes. A cop and a crook who have similar personal styles. Two blondes who are angular professional women. Two lawyers. One of the assassins looks a little like Alex, but has a beard. Such thoughts would never occur during the film, which is too enthralling. But it shows what love and care went into the construction of the puzzle. One of the film's pleasures is its unexpected details. The big dog Alex hauls around. The Christian Louboutin red-soled shoes that are worn on two most unlikely occasions. The steeplechase right in the middle of everything. The way flashbacks are manipulated in their framing so that the first one shows less than when it is reprised. The way solutions are dangled before us and then jerked away. The computer technique. The torturous path taken by some morgue photos. The seedy lawyer, so broke his name is scrawled on cardboard taped to the door. Alex patiently tutoring a young child. That the film clocks at only a whisper above two hours is a miracle. And then look at the acting. Francois Cluzet is ideal as the hero: compact, handsome in a 40ish Dustin Hoffman sort of way, believable at all times (but then, we know his story is true). Marie-Josee Croze, with enough psychic weight she's present even when absent. Kristin Scott Thomas, not the outsider she might seem. Legendary Jean Rochefort, in a role legendary John Huston would have envied. Legendary Francois Berleand as a senior cop who will make you think of Inspector Maigret. And legendary Andre Dussollier sitting on the bench until the movie needs the bases cleared. Here is how a thriller should be made. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Choke - Rated R - 92 minutes - Flat
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To visit the absurdist world of “Choke,” the second film adapted from a novel by the “Fight Club” author Chuck Palahniuk, requires that you dive through the looking glass into a labyrinth where personal identity is fluid. At one point its cheerfully snarky narrator and self-proclaimed sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), is half-convinced that he is cloned from tissue taken from the foreskin of a holy relic. Might he be the son of the son of the Son of God? This dubious information is gleaned from Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), the angelic, too-good-to-be-true doctor treating the worsening dementia of his mother, Ida (Angelica Huston). As the rumor of Victor’s divine origins spreads among the elderly female patients in the dreary mental hospital, he becomes an object of worship. The first film directed by the actor Clark Gregg, who wrote the screenplay, “Choke” is a comedy marinated in the aesthetic of cooler-than-thou irony and hip transgression. "Choke" is a tricky film to deconstruct; it's a charmingly low-budget character piece that's episodic in nature, leaving the viewer to examine the overall experience, not necessarily the working parts. But except for a couple of hilarious riffs, its jokes are not laugh-out-loud funny. The movie prods you to smirk and maybe gasp at its subversive imagination. As it toys with nihilism and hurls poisoned darts at religion, medicine and self-help, it adds up to an entertaining collection of vignettes strung together by a sarcastic loudmouth whose heart is breaking under his sophomoric bravado. “Choke” takes it title from a stunt Victor repeatedly pulls to help pay for his mother’s hospitalization: he simulates a choking fit in a restaurant until an alarmed patron rushes up to administer the Heimlich maneuver. After bonding with the individual who thinks he has saved his life, Victor hits him up for a handout. You might think that the man whose life was saved would be the one to offer a reward, but in Mr. Palahniuk’s world of endless role playing, it is the other way around. The film revolves around two of Mr. Palahniuk’s favorite intertwined themes: a lost young man’s search for a father figure, and the atavistic male need, stymied by modern civilization, to vent antisocial aggression and to conquer simply for the visceral thrill of it. “Fight Club” focused on ritualized extreme fighting and its homoerotic subtext; “Choke” focuses on zipless sex, which the movie convincingly portrays as compulsive coupling without an iota of joy. Victor, who attends 12-step meetings for sex addiction with his best friend, Denny (Brad William Henke), is just beginning the fourth step, which involves taking an inventory of his life. The movie is that inventory. Victor and Denny work as historical re-enactors at Colonial Dunsboro, an 18th-century theme park, where Victor impersonates an Irish indentured servant. The humiliating work requires them to wear period costumes, speak in archaic language and eliminate any telltale indications of contemporaneity from their behavior. Mr. Gregg has an amusing cameo as Lord High Charlie, the humorless, fanatically strict manager of this fake community, who stays in character even when he is not working. Because Victor is better looking than Denny, he has no trouble finding sexual partners. During 12-step meetings he and Nico (Paz de la Huerta), a fellow sex addict, slip away to get it on on a bathroom floor. In the movie’s funniest scene Victor hooks up with a computer date whose elaborately detailed rape fantasy is a control freak’s recipe for not really losing control. Denny, whose sexual opportunities are fewer, ultimately falls in love with Cherry Daiquiri (Gillian Jacobs), a stripper who changes her name to Beth. As the movie zigzags hither and yon, it continually returns to the relationship of Victor and Ida, a twisted mother-son bond that recalls Ms. Huston and John Cusack’s power struggle in “The Grifters” bent through several hoops. Flashbacks reveal a pattern in which Ida repeatedly kidnapped Victor from the foster homes in which he had been placed. No wonder he has abandonment issues. Playing both the reckless, headstrong younger Ida and the frail but still-demanding older woman who mistakes Victor for everyone but himself when he visits, Ms. Huston gives a compelling portrayal of someone whose mind may be shredded but whose ferocious willpower remains undiminished. It remains for Mr. Rockwell to create a center for a satire that is about not having a center. He distills a skeptical attitude of an under-40 everyman from the educated class (he is a medical school dropout): bored and cynical, concealing his hurt under layers of defiance, sarcasm and feigned indifference. Mr. Rockwell makes you see all the layers as well as feel the pain that lies beneath. Rockwell's dynamic character shadings go a long way to patching the holes in the story. As much as Gregg evokes the strained Vulcan pinch of life on Victor's neck, he's not always able to convey a sense of time passage. A few of the subplots, most concerning Denny and his abstinence, are left vague outlines in the final film. The same sensation follows Victor and his own clarity, which is intended to peak with a comedic anal explosion (call it a fecal miracle), but falls short since Gregg doesn't keep the subplot in the air long enough to digest it. "Choke" is grim yet often wickedly funny and takes the viewer down sobering roads of sexual compulsion and familial aggravation. It's a hypnotizing picture with a delightfully gritty awareness about it. Just ignore the abyssal dramatic potholes, and "Choke" will offer plenty of dysfunction to chew on. Review by Stephen Holden, nytimes.com
WARNING: “Choke” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has intense simulated sex scenes and strong language.
Religulous - Rated R - 101 minutes - Flat
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I'm going to try to review Bill Maher's "Religulous" without getting into religion. Is that OK with everybody? Good. I don't want to fan the flames of a holy war. The movie is about organized religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, TV evangelism and even Scientology, with detours into pagan cults and ancient Egypt. Bill Maher, host, writer and debater, believes they are all crazy. He fears they could lead us prayerfully into mutual nuclear doom. He doesn't get around to Hinduism or Buddhism, but he probably doesn't approve of them, either. This review is going to depend on one of my own deeply held beliefs: It's not what the movie is about, it's how it's about it. This movie is about Bill Maher's opinion of religion. He's very smart, quick and funny, and I found the movie entertaining, although sometimes he's a little mean to his targets. He visits holy places in Italy, Israel, Great Britain, Florida, Missouri and Utah, and talks with adherents of the religions he finds there, and others. Or maybe "talks with" is not quite the right phrase. It's more that he lines them up and shoots them down. He interrupts, talks over, slaps on subtitles, edits in movie and TV clips, and doesn't play fair. Reader, I took a guilty pleasure in his misbehavior. The people he interviews are astonishingly forbearing, even most of the truckers in a chapel at a truck stop. I expected somebody to take a swing at Maher, but nobody did, although one trucker walked out on him. Elsewhere in the film, Maher walks out on a rabbi who approvingly attended a Holocaust denial conference in Iran. Maher had a Jewish mother and a Catholic father, and was raised as a Catholic until he was 13, when his father stopped attending services. He speaks with his elderly mother, who tells him, "I don't know why he did that. We never discussed it." He asks her what the family believed, before and after that event. "I don't know what we believed," she says. No, she's not confused. She just doesn't know. Most everybody else in the film knows what they believe. If they don't, Maher does. He impersonates a Scientologist at the Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park, and says Scientology teaches that there was a race of Thetans several trillion years old (older than the universe, which is only 13.73 billion years) and that we are born with Thetans inside us, which can be detected by an E-Meter, on sale at your local Scientology center, and driven out by "auditing," which takes a long time and unfortunately costs money. Many of Maher's confrontations involve logical questions about holy books. For example, did Jonah really live for three days in the belly of a large fish? There are people who believe it. Is the End of Days at hand? A U.S. senator says he thinks so. Will the Rapture occur in our lifetimes? Widespread agreement. Mormons believe Missouri will be the paradise ("Branson, I hope," says Maher). There are even some people who believe Alaska has been chosen as a refuge for the Saved After Armageddon. In Kentucky, Maher visits the Creation Museum, which features a diorama of human children playing at the feet of dinosaurs. His two most delightful guests, oddly enough, are priests stationed in the Vatican. Between them, they cheerfully dismiss wide swaths of what are widely thought to be Catholic teachings, including the existence of Hell. One of these priests almost dissolves in laughter as he mentions various beliefs that I, as a child, solemnly absorbed in Catholic schools. The other observes that when Italians were polled to discover who was the first person they would pray to in a crisis, Jesus placed sixth. Maher meets two representations of Jesus. One is an actor at the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando. He stars in a re-enactment of the Passion, complete with crown of thorns, wounds, a crucifix, and Roman soldiers with whips. I suppose I understand why Florida tourists would take snapshots of this ordeal, but when Jesus stumbles, falls and is whipped by soldiers, I was a little puzzled why they applauded. The other Jesus, Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, believes he actually is the Second Coming -- i.e., Jesus made flesh in our time. He explains how the bloodline traveled from the Holy Land through France to Spain to Puerto Rico. He has 100,000 followers. Why have I focused on the Christians? Maher also has interesting debates with Muslims about whether the Koran calls for the death of infidels. And he interviews an Israeli manufacturer who invents devices to sidestep the bans on Sabbath activity. Since the laws prohibit you from operating machines, for example, they've invented a "negative telephone." Here's how it works: All the numbers on the touchpad are constantly engaged. All you do is insert little sticks into holes beside the numbers you don't want to work. I have done my job and described the movie. I report faithfully that I laughed frequently. You may very well hate it, but at least you've been informed. Perhaps you could enjoy the material about other religions, and tune out when yours is being discussed. That's only human nature. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Ghost Town - Rated PG-13 - 103 minutes - Flat
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A misanthropic dentist, a roguish ghost and a zany Egyptologist: as these unlikely companions scamper around Manhattan in the buoyant comedy "Ghost Town," they resurrect the spirits of classic movie curmudgeons like W. C. Fields and such romantic comedians as Cary Grant and Carole Lombard in Woody Allen territory. It would be easy to make too much of this froth, directed by David Koepp (screenwriter of Spielberg blockbusters) from a script he wrote with John Kamps. A latter-day hybrid of "Topper" and "Blithe Spirit" and a visual ode to autumn in New York, "Ghost Town" is a screwball comedy with no big surprises or hidden metaphors. But if you comb through the ranks of recent Hollywood comedies that have tried to conjure the same mood of airy amusement, most of what you'll find are strained, witless duds that get mired in sentimentality like flies in molasses. As it draws to a close, "Ghost Town" tiptoes to the edge of that sticky mess, but it doesn't get caught there. Its snappy dialogue and sharp comic timing, and the offbeat chemistry of Ricky Gervais (in his first feature-film starring role), Greg Kinnear and Téa Leoni, keep it afloat. The dentist, Bertram Pincus (Mr. Gervais), is a grumpy transplanted Briton who declares that he doesn't mind crowds, just the people in them, and shuts up his yammering patients by stuffing dental equipment in their mouths. Bertram is extremely annoyed when, after a seven-minute near-death experience during a routine colonoscopy, he suddenly finds himself a middleman between the living and the dead. On leaving the hospital he is besieged by anxious ghosts whom only he can see and hear. Trailing him around Manhattan, they pester him to take care of their unfinished business; only then can they happily disappear into the hereafter. As the living overhear him talking to the dead, the usual crossed signals and misunderstandings land him in trouble, but the movie doesn't overdo it. Mr. Gervais gives Bertram many of the same comic tics he brought to David Brent in "The Office" and Andy Millman in "Extras": a stammering befuddlement that is simultaneously verbose and nonsensical; sickly smiles and joyless laughs in which his mirth curdles with self-doubt; a tongue-tied staccato; and his special mixture of clueless grandiosity, insensitivity and stifled humiliation. Among the ghosts the most persistent noodge is Frank Herlihy (Mr. Kinnear), a slick yuppie go-getter with a cheating heart who in an early scene is struck by a bus while running away from a falling air-conditioner. Frank entreats Bertram to prevent his widow, Gwen (Ms. Leoni), from marrying Richard (Billy Campbell), a human-rights lawyer he believes is after her money, although the evidence he offers is flimsy. Gwen happens to live in the same Upper East Side apartment building as Bertram, and they have crossed paths many times. With each encounter Bertram has been monumentally rude, so befriending her is no easy task. Mr. Kinnear, now that he has some lines on his face, is no longer a Ken doll exuding boyish naïveté. His genial martini-drinking charmer with a wandering eye and a raised brow is about as close as anyone has come in a recent movie to Cary Grant, who starred in the original "Topper" in 1937. Most amusing of all is Ms. Leoni's eccentric Egyptologist. Equally enamored of her enormous dog, which knocks her over now and again and whose odor triggers Bertram's gag reflex, and a priceless mummy that is a centerpiece of a major exhibition she is putting together, Gwen solicits Bertram to conduct a professional examination of the mummy's mouth. Like Lombard's and Jean Arthur's plucky madcaps, Ms. Leoni's Gwen is a gal who keeps a tight rein on her feelings. Crisp and self-reliant, she is all the more attractive for her apparent lack of interest in beauty, fashion and wedding bells. If the semiromantic connection she develops with Bertram (he's smitten; she is interested but wary) isn't totally convincing, theirs is a classic screwball relationship of sassy, openhearted combat. As Frank nags Bertram, and Bertram woos Gwen in his ridiculous way, the pace of mush-free repartee rarely flags. Review by Stephen Holden, movies.nyt.com
The Duchess - Rated PG-13 - 109 minutes - Scope
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Much is made in Britain of the fact that Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806) was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. I wouldn't know where to start in counting my own great-great-great-great-aunts, but the Brits have an obsession with genealogy, and then too both women married men who were fabulously wealthy, had several enormous houses and kept mistresses, and both women had lovers. The difference is, Georgiana was more interesting. She was married off by her mother at 16 to William Cavendish, the fifth Duke of Devonshire, a man who loved his dogs more than her. She was treated like chattel, valued only for her breeding ability, raped by the duke at least once, and became the most famous woman in England, save for Queen Charlotte, whose husband was merely mad. Georgiana was an outspoken liberal, a supporter of the American and French revolutions, a campaigner for one Whig prime minister (Charles Fox) and the lover of another (Charles Grey, whose daughter she bore). She was a feminist who dared to speak publicly on politics, although she accepted that women did not have the vote. "The Duchess" is a handsome historical film, impeccably mounted, gowned, wigged and feathered, where a husband and wife spend hours being dressed in order to appear at dinner to argue about whether the mutton is off. With Keira Knightley playing the duchess and Ralph Fiennes playing her husband, such a conversation is a minefield. The man has no conversation, addresses her primarily to issue instructions and is obsessed with the production of a male heir, who would have much to inherit, including the grandest private house in London, and Chatsworth, in Derbyshire, the favorite of all British country houses. (I have visited Chatsworth and I was in awe. At today's prices, not even Bill Gates could live like the Devonshires.) For a woman to be the duchess of such a private kingdom, to be immersed in politics, to be a beauty, a wit, a fashion leader and a feisty scrapper with an appetite for better sex than the duke provisioned, Georgiana must have been extraordinary. I am not sure "The Duchess" quite does her justice. Yes, her marital views were flexible. She disliked but tacitly accepted the duke's numerous adulteries. She made only one close female friend, Lady Elizabeth Foster (Hayley Atwell), and the duke rogered her, too. Georgiana was enraged not only because of his infidelity, but for being robbed of her friend. Later they made up, and she accepted Bess and her three sons into their household, referring to William as "our husband." There was a reason for Bess' betrayal, and it wasn't lust. Her cruel husband had banned her from ever seeing her sons again, and William was powerful enough to reunite her with them. Later, he is quite prepared to prevent Georgiana from ever seeing their four children. Women had no rights even to their offspring. The Whigs, although behind the curve, were clearly the party of the future; the Tories supported the status quo. The duke, duchess and even Lady Elizabeth are capable of behaving according to the rules governing their class in even the most inflammatory situations. They often act as if onstage, and they are. When Lady Spencer (Charlotte Rampling), Georgiana's mother, says her affair with Grey is the talk of London, why should she be surprised? Every conversation in this film takes place in the presence of at least two servants. I deeply enjoyed the film, but then I am an Anglophile. I imagine the behavior of the characters will seem exceedingly odd to some viewers. Well, it is. William is a right proper bastard without normal feelings -- a monster. How do you make love with the fifth Duke of Devonshire? You close your eyes and think of the sixth Duke of Devonshire. Georgiana puts up with more than we can imagine. When we see her tender and playful in the company of Earl Grey, it is a refreshing change. We do not see William and Bess bedding each other, and just as well. We hear them. This is not one of those delightful movies based on a Jane Austen novel. It is about hard realists, constrained in a stifling system and using whatever weapons they can command. It is rather fascinating on that level, although I would have loved to learn more about what the Whigs at that formal dinner really thought about Charles Fox's vision of the rights of man and the abolition of the slave trade. Note: Yes, the famous tea is named after Earl Grey. It is my second favorite, after Lapsang Souchong, which has an aroma stirring nostalgia for fresh tar in autumn. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
That's it, That's all - NR - 109 minutes - Scope
Amid the never-ending mission to find the next adventure comes a snowboard film that opens doors to the possibilities. Dedicated to everything snowboarding, Travis Rice and a dream team crew set out on a seek-and-destroy operation for the new zone, the new trick and the new perspective on the sport. New Zealand, Valdez, B.C., Munich, Tokyo, Jackson Hole and deeper... seen in a new light with action that leaves you wondering, how did they do that? Aspiring to bring you closer, the HiDef, 35mm, super 16 footage answers the question why TRice and his friends have poured blood, sweat, tears and soul into a simple thing like snowboarding. Take a look. That's it. That's all.
I.O.U.S.A. - Rated PG - 90 minutes - Flat
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A letter to our grandchildren, Raven, Emil and Taylor: I see you growing up into such beautiful people, and I wish all good things to you as you make the leap into adulthood. But I have just seen a documentary titled "I.O.U.S.A." that snapped into sharp focus why your lives may not be as pleasant as ours have been. Chaz and I had the blessing of growing up in an optimistic, bountiful America. We never fully realized that we were paying for many of our comforts with your money. Let me explain. There is something called the "national debt." In the movie's interviews with ordinary people, it has a hard time finding anyone who knows exactly what that is. Well, I've never exactly known, either. I thought I knew, but it never came up in conversation, and it became a meaningless abstraction, even though in 2009, the debt will pass $9 trillion. You might think of those as dollars our nation has spent without having them. What will this mean to you? It will mean you will live in a country no longer able to pay for many of the services and guarantees we take for granted. In 40 years, when you are still less than my age, it looks like the government will only be able to pay for three things: Interest on the national debt, "some" Social Security and "some" Medicare. It will not be able to afford any of the other functions it now performs. How did we get into this situation? With a federal government that has been throwing bad money after good. Of all the presidents in the last century, the only one who was able to achieve a balanced budget and produce a surplus was Bill Clinton. He did that by bravely raising taxes and cutting spending. Our current president, George W. Bush, is now finishing up eight years of throwing around money like a drunken sailor. His fellow conservatives, like Rush Limbaugh, like to talk about "tax and spend Democrats." But they seem to be "don't tax and spend even more Republicans." Not that this film takes sides. It is non-partisan and includes many Republicans who agree with its argument that the country is headed for disaster within the lifetimes of many now living. It centers on David M. Walker, until recently the U.S. comptroller general, and Robert Bixby, the head of the nonpartisan Concord Coalition, who have been on a national "Fiscal Wake-Up" tour that will last until the November elections. They are trying to sound the alarm, but they speak to half-empty town halls and captive Rotarians and get pushed off the local news by a story of a man who swallowed a diamond. I don't really believe this review will inspire enormous numbers of people to go see the film. But if they do, they'll find it accomplishes an amazing thing. It explains the national debt, the foreign trade deficit, the decrease in personal savings, how the prime interest rate works, and the weakness of our leaders. No, not only George W. Bush, but politicians of both parties, who know if they vote against tax cuts, they will be lambasted by their opponents and could lose their jobs. In the film, we see President Bush being asked about the debt and replying: "Ask the economists. I think I only got a B-minus in economics." Then he gives that little chuckle. "But I got an A-plus in cutting taxes." Yes, he cut taxes while our national spending mushroomed. What we have to do is bite the bullet and pay higher taxes while spending less. The war in Iraq is a much sexier issue. But no matter what happens in Iraq, the real crisis we face is the debt. The movie includes testimony by former Fed chairman Paul Volker, former Treasury Department secretary Paul O'Neill, billionaire Warren Buffett, congressman Ron Paul and others on both sides of the fence who all agree: Don't buy what you can't pay for. Here's an interesting statistic. I remember when "Made in China" meant cheap and shabby merchandise. No longer. In the ranking of the trade imbalance among all the world's nations, China is first with the highest surplus, and the United States is last with the largest deficit. The Chinese now hold a huge chunk of our debt. If they ever call in the loan, it would destroy our economy. In the presidential debate earlier in the year, Ron Paul was a lonely voice talking about the debt; the others on both sides paid lip service to the problem and moved on. So here's the bottom line, kids. The United States is probably going to go broke during your lifetimes. Actually, it's already broke, but getting deeper into debt allows it to keep running on thin air, like the Road Runner. My advice? Learn Chinese. Start savings accounts. Don't buy what you can't afford. Any politician who tries to win votes by promising to cut taxes is digging our country's grave. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
The Secret Life of Bees - Rated PG-13 - 110 minutes - Scope
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As a realistic portrayal of life in rural South Carolina in 1964, "The Secret Life of Bees" is dreaming. As a parable of hope and love, it is enchanting. Should it have been painful, or a parable? Parable, I think, so it will please those who loved the novel by Sue Monk Kidd. One critic has described it as sappy, syrupy, sentimental and sermonizing, and those are only the S's. The same reviewer admitted that it is also "wholesome and heartwarming," although you will never see "wholesome" used in a movie ad. I go with heartwarming. There is such a thing as feeling superior to your emotions, but I trust mine. If I sense the beginnings of a teardrop in my eye during a movie, that is evidence more tangible than all the mighty weight of Film Theory. "The immediate experience," one of the wisest of critics called it. That's what you have to acknowledge. I watched the movie, abandoned history and plausibility, and just plain fell for it. If it had been a bad movie, it would have been ripe for vivisection. But it is not a bad movie. Above all, it contains characters I care for, played by actors I admire. If a script doesn't get in the way, a movie like that just about has to work. Queen Latifah, who combines conviction, humor and a certain majesty, plays August Boatwright, a woman about as plausible as a fairy godmother, and so what? She lives outside town in a house painted the color of the Easter Bunny and gathers honey for a living. Famous honey, from happy bees. Living with her are her two sisters: June (Alicia Keys), a classical cellist and civil rights activist, and May (Sophie Okonedo), who you don't want to startle with anything sad. In a shack many miles away, 14-year-old Lily Owens (Dakota Fanning) lives with her cruel father (Paul Bettany). Her best friend and defender, the black housekeeper Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), endures the wrath of the father, because she will not abandon Lily. One day Rosaleen is so bold as to attempt to register to vote and is beaten by racists in the nearby town. This results, of course, in her arrest. Lily helps her escape the town, and they set off on a journey to the town of Tiburon, which she knows about because of something she found in her late mother's possessions ... the label for a honey jar. As Lily helps Rosaleen flee from virtual slavery, it's impossible not to think about Huck and Jim, unless political correctness has prevented you from reading that greatest of all novels about black and white in America. From what little we see of the folks in Tiburon, they're as nice as the folks in Lily's hometown were mean. They land on August's doorstep. She takes them in, over resistance from the militant June. And there the proper story begins, involving discoveries about the past, problems in the present and hopes for the future. These are well-handled melodramatic events that would not benefit from being revealed here.
Dakota Fanning comes of age in "The Secret Life of Bees" and in the somewhat similar but less successful "Hounddog." She's not a kid anymore. She has always been a good actress, and she is only growing deeper and better. I expect her to make the transition from child to woman with the same composure and wisdom that Jodie Foster demonstrated. Here she plays a plucky, forthright and sometimes sad and needy young teen with the breadth this role requires and a depth that transforms it. Then observe Sophie Okonedo, the London-born, Cambridge-educated actress who has no trouble at all playing a simpleminded, deeply disturbed country girl. The English have little trouble with Southern accents. Michael Caine explained it to me once. It has to do with Appalachia being settled by working-class Brits. Her May is the heart of the film, because her own heart is so open. She has some delicate emotional transitions to traverse here and convinces us of them. Remember her in "Hotel Rwanda"? The Alicia Keys character, June, is really too complex for a supporting role. In the workings of the story, she functions as an eye-opener for Rosaleen, who has never guessed black women could be so gifted and outspoken. The three sisters live in an idyllic household that must have taken a powerful lot of honey sales, even then, to maintain. That isn't an issue. We believe it, because Queen Latifah as August beams watchfully on all before her, and nobody can beam like Latifah. If ever there was a woman born to be christened Queen, she's the one. I have great affection for this film because it honors a novel that many people loved for good reasons. It isn't superior, nor does it dumb it down. It sees what is good and honors it. The South was most likely not like this in 1964. That was the year the Civil Rights Act was passed, and a year before the Voting Rights Act became law. The Boatwright farm, as I said, is really a dream. But in those hard days, people needed dreams.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas - Rated PG-13 - 95 minutes - Flat
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Moviegoers may be forgiven for feeling a little Holocaust fatigue. There have been so many films about the subject or that use it as a backdrop that there's no shame in feeling a bit numb to it all. And then "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" comes along, brings us fresh eyes and opens the wounds anew. This is the most heartbreaking film about the Holocaust since "Schindler's List." That Mark Herman's film of John Boyne's novel manages such poignancy in 90 compact minutes is nothing short of miraculous. With "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,'' writer-director Mark Herman attempts to do on film what John Boyne did on the printed page in his 2006 novel: Confront the horror of the Holocaust in a story aimed primarily at older children (the movie is being released under the Disney banner in the United Kingdom).The film's PG-13 rating is a good indicator of the appropriate age for younger audiences, although older viewers should brace themselves, too. Even though it unfolds almost entirely through a child's eyes and contains no on-screen violence, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas'' packs as devastating a punch as an adult-oriented drama about the subject. Its concluding five minutes are almost impossible to watch. But that, of course, is the point of the story, which begins in Berlin in the early stages of World War II, when wide-eyed, 8-year-old German boy Bruno (the remarkable Asa Butterfield) learns his military father (David Thewlis) has received a promotion that requires the family to move to "the countryside.'' The family's new home is remote and drab, almost fortress-like. Bruno complains about not having anyone to play with except his sister (Amber Beattie), and she's no fun. And when he asks his mother (Vera Farmiga) about the nearby "farm'' he can glimpse from a corner of his bedroom window — a farm where everyone wears striped pajamas — she immediately tells him to forget about all that and forbids him from ever going near there. But a child's curiosity cannot be stopped, and soon Bruno is spending his afternoons talking through an electrified wire fence with a little boy named Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), who lives on the farm with his father, wears the same odd pajamas and is constantly asking him to bring back some food. Director Herman rarely pulls us out of Bruno's naive view of the world, which adds a layer of unsettling ominousness to scenes such as the one in which Bruno asks his father what that horrible smell coming from the farm's chimneys is. ("They burn rubbish there sometimes,'' his dad replies.) Despite its focus on children, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas'' shrewdly keeps us apprised of how the adults in the story are responding to their new environment. The better he does at his job, the more short-tempered and emotionally distant Bruno's dad seems to become, illustrating how many Nazi soldiers lost their perspective — and their souls — as the German army's power grew. Bruno notices his mom's increasingly nervous, restless moods, and he's struck, too, by how his sister has started covering the walls of her room with Nazi paraphernalia and Hitler posters. But mostly Bruno just concentrates on finding new ways to play with his friend. By maintaining its focus on its child protagonist, "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas'' lulls you into the false security of an innocent's worldview, helping its finale achieve its pulverizing power. It is one of the most moving and remarkable films about childhood I’ve ever seen. The setting of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is as grim as it gets, but the perspective is a magical piece of cinema. The movie might result in some difficult questions from children about the Holocaust, but they are conversations well worth having. Review by Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald
A Girl Cut in Two - NR - 115 minutes - Flat
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Claude Chabrol's French update of an American scandal is subtle and complex. Impeccably made and uncompromisingly adult, Claude Chabrol's "A Girl Cut in Two" is unquestionably the work of a master. As well it should be, given that the celebrated French filmmaker has produced more than 50 features in a full half-century of directing. If you don't believe all that experience can come in handy, this involving and intelligent film will change your mind. The standard critical line on Chabrol is that he's a maestro of suspense, a kind of Gallic Alfred Hitchcock, but as he's gotten older (the director just turned 78, a month after Clint Eastwood) his films have ventured more toward investigations of the intricacies of human relationships, a subject that never ceases to fascinate.This particular film, co-scripted by Chabrol and his longtime assistant director, Cecile Maistre, is especially interesting because it is unapologetically based on one of the great scandals of turn-of-the-century America, the salacious romantic triangle between New York architect Stanford White, comely actress Evelyn Nesbit and her unbalanced millionaire husband, Harry K. Thaw. Without missing a beat, Chabrol and Maistre have transferred the story to contemporary France and turned it into a study of the confounding nature of the human heart, of the way innocence and corruption can be at such devastating cross purposes that, as one character puts it, "love is the only crime that gives a life sentence." "A Girl Cut in Two" is set not in the French capital of Paris but in Lyon, where reclusive literary lion Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand) has hidden himself away. A creature of bored-with-it-all cynicism, he's introduced taking a meeting with his editor, played by Mathilda May, who, in the director's words, emanates such a "strange sensuality" that "seeing her, we ask ourselves straight away into what world we have ventured." The editor persuades Saint-Denis to appear on a local television interview show where he runs into the gorgeous Gabrielle Deneige (Ludivine Sagnier), the local weather girl, understandably considered "the sunshine of this station." An actress since she was 10, Sagnier has been in more than 30 films, including playing Tinkerbell in P.J. Hogan's 2003 "Peter Pan," and it is her ability to add complexity to what could have been a stock character that gives "A Girl Cut in Two" much of its effectiveness. Though she is the weather girl, it's clear that Gabrielle is a smart, capable woman, definitely nobody's fool, though determined, as many young people are, to prove that "I'm not a kid anymore." Her weakness, as indicated by her last name ("of the snow"), is the purity and genuineness of her emotions, a character trait that in a better world than the one Chabrol has conjured up would be an advantage instead of a vulnerability. Saint-Denis is not the only man who is seriously attracted to Gabrielle. She also catches the eye of Paul Gaudens (Benoit Magimel), the mentally unstable heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, a man used to getting what he wants and a classic example of too much money and too little sense. But Gabrielle sees a kind of sweetness in Paul and, remarkably, his temperament reflects that when he is in her presence. With his icy but somehow humane hauteur and his uncompromising narrative sense, Chabrol is the ideal person to investigate how Gabrielle fares in a heartless world where men control the levers of power. Chabrol, as he says himself, has created "an entirely chaste film whose characters are nonetheless haunted by the most perverse ideas." Gabrielle is more than a girl cut in two by this ambience, she's pulled every which way, a situation that the director investigates with the subtlety and complexity only a lifetime behind the camera can provide. Review by Kenneth Turan, kenneth.turan@latimes.com
Happy-Go-Lucky - Rated R - 118 minutes - Scope
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Mike Leigh's "Happy-Go-Lucky" is the story of a good woman. As simple as that. We first see Poppy peddling her bike through London, and smiling all the time to herself. She stops at a bookshop and tries to cheer up the dour proprietor. No, that isn't right. She doesn't want to change him, just infect him with her irrepressible good nature. She may not even be aware of how she operates. Then her bike is stolen. She takes that right in stride. Poppy is one of the most difficult roles any actress could be assigned. She must smile and be peppy and optimistic at (almost) all times, and do it naturally and convincingly, as if the sunshine comes from inside. That's harder than playing Lady Macbeth. Sally Hawkins been in movies before, including Leigh's "Vera Drake" and Woody Allen's "Cassandra's Dream," but this is her star-making role. She was named best actress at Berlin 2008. I will deliberately employ a cliche: She is a joy to behold.
At first, that seems to be all there is to it. The movie will be about Poppy, and her job as an elementary schoolteacher, and the lessons she is taking in flamenco dancing, and her flatmate Zoe, and her sister, Suzy, and how she starts to feel about Tim, the school counselor who comes to assist her with a troubled little boy. That would almost be enough. But "Happy-Go-Lucky" is about a great deal more, and goes very much deeper.
As she works with the little boy, we see that she's not at all superficial, but can listen, observe, empathize and find the right note in response. In another scene, which may not seem to fit but is profoundly effective, she comes across a homeless man in the shadows under a rail line, and talks with him. He's one of those people who chants the same thing, ferociously, over and over. She listens to him, speaks with him, asks if he's hungry. She is not afraid. She's worried about him. I think he's aware of that, and it soothes him. It is possible nobody has spoken to him in days or weeks. So we get these glimpses into Poppy's deeper regions. Then she decides to take driving lessons and meets Scott, the instructor. He is played brilliantly by Eddie Marsan, an English comedian who as an actor often finds morose, worrywart roles. See him as the pessimistic Jewish father in the recent "Sixty-Six." Scott is an angry man. Oddly for a driving instructor, he seems to channel road rage. His system for helping her remember the rear-view mirror and the two side mirrors involve naming them after fallen angels. He screams at her. No one could drive with Scott at their side. Any other person would quit working with Scott after one lesson. Not Poppy. Does she think she can help him? Their relationship descends into an extraordinary scene during which we suddenly see right inside both of them and understand better what Poppy's cheerfulness is all about. We also see Scott's terrifying insecurity and self-loathing; Marsan is spellbinding. This is Mike Leigh's funniest film since "Life Is Sweet" (1991). Of course he hasn't ever made a completely funny film, and "Happy-Go-Lucky" has scenes that are not funny, not at all. There are always undercurrents and oddness. His films feel as if they're spontaneously unfolding; he has a vision of his characters that is only gradually revealed. He almost always finds remarkable performances, partly because he casts actors, not stars, and partly because he and the actors rehearse for weeks, tilting the dialogue this way and that, contriving back stories, finding out where the characters came from before the movie began, predicting where they will go after it's over. I had seen Sally Hawkins in movies before. She was the rich girl who went to the private clinic in "Vera Drake." No role could be more different than Poppy. Leigh, who spent years working for the stage, was able to imagine her as Poppy, a role very few women could play. Maybe Meryl Streep could sustain that level of merriness, but then what can't she do? And now I must ask, what can't Hawkins do? There are countless ways she might have stepped wrong. But she breezes in on her bicycle and engages our deepest sympathy. Poppy has a gift, as I said, for not running, but standing there, reading the situation, understanding other people and acting helpfully. By that I do not mean she cheers them up.
Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Nothing Like the Holidays - Rated PG-13 - 99 minutes - Scope
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Every once in a while, you sense you're watching actors being allowed to do what they hoped to do when they got into show biz. That would be playing characters familiar to their experience, in a warm-hearted story, without exploitation and without a "message" as much as the right kind of feeling. Oh, they wanted to make blockbusters, too, and cavort with superheroes and be in great love scenes and get to drive fast and dodge bullets and plunge into deep drama and tear their hearts out and win Oscars. But those things are less rare than such a movie as Alfredo de Villa's "Nothing Like the Holidays." Here is a story filmed almost entirely in a Chicago neighborhood, Humboldt Park, which has rich and poor, yuppies and welfare families, problems and solutions, all ages, all faiths, all races, all within several blocks of one another. In a nice-size house on a typical street live a Puerto Rican couple, Anna and Eduardo Rodriguez, who are not new to the neighborhood. In their home, for the first time in several years, all the members of their far-flung boricua family gather for Christmas. The older son, Mauricio (John Leguizamo), is home from New York with his executive wife, Sarah (Debra Messing). A son (Freddy Rodriguez) is home from the war in Iraq. A daughter (Vanessa Ferlito) dreams of being a Hollywood star. There's a know-it-all cousin (Luis Guzman). An ex-girlfriend of the military man (Melonie Diaz). A family friend (Jay Hernandez) since the good old days. Spouses in general. A houseful. All presided over by Anna (Elizabeth Pena) and the somehow absentminded Eduardo (Alfred Molina). Eduardo runs the family grocery store or bodega, an anchor of the neighborhood. He has long dreamed of a son taking it over, but this does not seem to be. Anna has long yearned for a grandchild, and regards Sarah as if hinting that a joyous announcement only would be polite. Anna and Eduardo are undergoing great unhappiness in their marriage; it's always a danger signal when someone leaves the room to take a cell call. But find out about that for yourself. The big issue that Eduardo and Anna share publicly is her desire to get rid of the sick old tree in the middle of the lawn, and his reluctance to commence this family duty, or much of any other, on Christmas Eve. The performers breathe real life into the characters, starting with Elizabeth Pena and Alfred Molina. Leguizamo is more pensive than we're used to. The actors are good at something that seems almost impossible, all talking at high energy and interrupting one another, as if they really have known one another very well for a long time. This cannot come easily and may take more of a knack than heavy drama. The story unspools, the threads sometimes tangling, as many a family reunion movie has before this one. "A Puerto Rican family," writes one of the fanboys on IMDb. "Dear God, I hate those movies." He is open-minded: "All these movies with ethnic families (Italians, Greeks, Puerto Ricans, etc. etc.), they all suck." Do you have the feeling he's living in the wrong country? Another deep thinker on the same board writes, "Debra Messing = Puerto Rican??" No, but then she doesn't play one. For that matter, several members of the cast are not of Puerto Rican descent, but you know what? They're actors. And the story is familiar to their experience not because they're mostly Latino but because they're human and have families. That's the point of this movie. If you could be the invisible Ghost of Christmas Present in the Rodriguez house, what would you see? If you've been lucky, you'd see memories of your own family holidays. There's nothing magic about being Puerto Rican. I could not only identify with but recognize every experience this family has. To a necessary degree the screenplay by Alison Swan and Rick Najera follows familiar formulas. But then the dialogue, the specifics, and especially the acting take charge, and the movie becomes funny, sad, corny, romantic, heartfelt, all when it needs to be. One of the most touching moments occurs between Anna and Sarah, who had not expected to get along very well this holiday. Sarah plays a Jewish woman who doesn't know from this Puerto Rican Christmas. She doesn't want to look like a snob, but she's from a different background, and that's also how Anna sees her. But what with one thing and another, Sarah starts to love the family, and Anna starts to love her. You know, Anna informs her quietly, there are some very fine Jewish Puerto Ricans. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Synecdoche, New York - Rated R - 123 minutes - Scope
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I think you have to see Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely. A lot of people these days don't even go to a movie once. There are alternatives. It doesn't have to be the movies, but we must somehow dream. If we don't "go to the movies" in any form, our minds wither and sicken. This is a film with the richness of great fiction. Like Suttree, the Cormac McCarthy novel I'm always mentioning, it's not that you have to return to understand it. It's that you have to return to realize how fine it really is. The surface may daunt you. The depths enfold you. The whole reveals itself, and then you may return to it like a talisman. Wow, is that ever not a "money review." Why will people hurry along to what they expect to be trash, when they're afraid of a film they think may be good? The subject of "Synecdoche, New York" is nothing less than human life and how it works. Using a neurotic theater director from upstate New York, it encompasses every life and how it copes and fails. Think about it a little and, my god, it's about you. Whoever you are. Here is how life is supposed to work. We come out of ourselves and unfold into the world. We try to realize our desires. We fold back into ourselves, and then we die. "Synecdoche, New York" follows a life that ages from about 40 to 80 on that scale. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a theater director, with all of the hangups and self-pity, all the grandiosity and sniffles, all the arrogance and fear, typical of his job. In other words, he could be me. He could be you. The job, the name, the race, the gender, the environment, all change. The human remains pretty much the same. Here is how it happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things. In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation -- but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again. Hold that trajectory in mind and let it interact with age, discouragement, greater wisdom and more uncertainty. You will understand what "Synecdoche, New York" is trying to say about the life of Caden Cotard and the lives in his lives. Charlie Kaufman is one of the few truly important writers to make screenplays his medium. David Mamet is another. That is not the same as a great writer (Faulkner, Pinter, Cocteau) who writes screenplays. Kaufman is writing in the upper reaches with Bergman. Now for the first time he directs. It is obvious that he has only one subject, the mind, and only one plot, how the mind negotiates with reality, fantasy, hallucination, desire and dreams. "Being John Malkovich." "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." "Adaptation." "Human Nature." "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind." What else are they about? He is working in plain view. In one film, people go inside the head of John Malkovich. In another, a writer has a twin who does what he cannot do. In another, a game show host is, or thinks he is, an international spy. In "Human Nature," a man whose childhood was shaped by domineering parents trains white mice to sit down at a tiny table and always employ the right silverware. Is behavior learned or enforced?
"Synecdoche, New York" is not a film about the theater, although it looks like one. A theater director is an ideal character for representing the role Kaufman thinks we all play. The magnificent sets, which stack independent rooms on top of one another, are the compartments we assign to our life's enterprises. The actors are the people in roles we cast from our point of view. Some of them play doubles assigned to do what there's not world enough and time for. They have a way of acting independently, in violation of instructions. They try to control their own projections. Meanwhile, the source of all this activity grows older and tired, sick and despairing. Is this real or a dream? The world is but a stage, and we are mere actors upon it. It's all a play. The play is real. This has not been a conventional review. There is no need to name the characters, name the actors, assign adjectives to their acting. Look at who is in this cast. You know what I think of them. This film must not have seemed strange to them. It's what they do all day, especially waiting around for the director to make up his mind. Review by Roger Ebert, rogerebert.suntimes.com
Rachel Getting Married - Rated R - 114 minutes - Flat
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The problem in “Rachel Getting Married” — not the problem with the film, mind you — is that even though Rachel is the one getting married, it’s all about Kym, her younger sister. Kym, played by a decidedly un-princessy Anne Hathaway, is furloughed from rehab for the happy event, arriving at her father’s rambling Connecticut clapboard house on a toxic cloud of snark, cigarette smoke and wounded narcissism. With her pale, slack features and dark-rimmed eyes framed by severe bangs, Ms. Hathaway resembles the silent film star Louise Brooks in “Pandora’s Box,” except that Kym is less like the curious maiden of Greek mythology than like the box itself: a bottomless repository of guilt, destructiveness and general bad feeling. And yet she is also an undeniably magnetic figure, drawing the attention of her father (Bill Irwin) away from Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and pulling both the film’s and her family’s center of gravity toward the self-loathing, self-pitying core of her damaged personality. And like the family the film, directed by Jonathan Demme from a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, both accommodates Kym’s need for recognition and struggles against it. The themes of dependency and recovery that Kym brings home in her overnight bag are familiar, even banal. Every unhappy family may be unique, but every addict is fundamentally the same, and if “Rachel Getting Married” had surrendered its story completely to Kym, it would have risked becoming as drab and familiar as a made-for-television 12-step homily. But Mr. Demme protects the film against such an unsatisfying fate. He is certainly sympathetic to Kym, even as he and Ms. Hathaway conspire to show her at her appalling worst. But he has never been one to restrict his sympathies, and the wonderful thing about “Rachel Getting Married” is how expansive it seems, in spite of the limits of its scope and the modesty of its ambitions. It’s a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare. Neither the conceit nor the approach are all that unusual. In press materials Mr. Demme cites “A Wedding,” Robert Altman’s marvelously anarchic 1978 pageant of bourgeois dysfunction, as an inspiration. He also shows a clear debt to the ostentatiously austere methods of the fading Dogma 95 movement. The audience only hears music that the people in the movie hear as well, and the proceedings are recorded by a busily wandering video camera, giving “Rachel Getting Married” some of the rough, hectic intimacy of “The Celebration,” Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogma tour de force about a family party knocked off kilter by secrets and recriminations. Mr. Demme is neither as sadistic as Mr. Vinterberg nor as satirical as Mr. Altman. This is, after all, the man who directed “The Silence of the Lambs,” surely the most humane serial-killer movie in the annals of the genre, as well as the infinitely tolerant “Philadelphia.” (His more recent work consists of earnest documentaries like “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains” and “The Agronomist” and underrated updates of 1960s thrillers — “The Manchurian Candidate” and “The Truth About Charlie.”) He is the kind of filmmaker who gives Hollywood liberalism a good name, and the most striking aspect of “Rachel Getting Married” is how, without overt ideological posturing, it paints a faithful and affectionate (though hardly uncritical) portrait of blue-state America. And this is where the movie turns out to be, after all, about Rachel, a lovely and complicated young woman whose adoring fiancé, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), is black. Rachel and Kym’s stepmother, Carol (Anna Deavere Smith), is also African-American, as far as we can tell. These facts are never mentioned by anyone in the movie, which gathers races, traditions and generations in a pleasing display of genteel multiculturalism. It’s a big, messy gathering even without Kym’s melodrama, so there may be no time for expressions of prejudice or social unease. It might seem that this tableau is a kind of Utopian wish fulfillment, the naïve projection of a longed-for harmony that does not yet exist. To some extent this may be true, but the texture of “Rachel Getting Married” is so loose and lived in, its faces (many of them belonging to nonprofessional actors) so interesting and real, that it looks more plausibly like a mirror of the way things are. It is not that racial division is willed away or made to disappear, but rather that, on this particular weekend, other matters are more important. A wedding, after all, represents a symbolic as well as an actual union, an intimation of possible perfection in a decidedly imperfect world. And so it may be up to Kym, cynical and solipsistic, to save the movie from sentimentality, just as Rachel, embodied with calm intelligence by Ms. DeWitt, inoculates it against melodrama. Debra Winger, in a few quietly incandescent scenes as their mother, briefly lifts the movie onto another plane altogether, somehow combining movie-star charisma with an almost heartbreaking restraint and giving us a taste of what we’ve been missing in the years of her semi-retirement. In any case, it would be a shame to miss “Rachel Getting Married,” which may have its flaws, but which is so persuasively forgiving of the flaws of its inhabitants that you can only respond, in like spirit, with love. Review By A. O. Scott, movies.nytimes.com
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