Lovely, lyrical film about two friends in their 30's or so who reconnect after years apart. One of them has become "respectable", and is an expectant father. The other is still searching for a transcendent moment, a kind of elusive purity of feeling. He wants his old friend to share it with him, and he plans a hike into the woods to a hot spring, to try to rebuild the relationship. Very slow-moving and quiet, but richly evocative of friendship and change and, as the title suggests, how sorrow is really nothing more than old joy.
Daniel London, William Oldham
Ryan Gosling is all method-actor as he plays an inner-city high school teacher with a serious addiction. Gosling plays Dunne, an idealist, trying to teach his Grade 8 students about Pinochet and civil rights, while barely able to sustain his own life. He develops a relationship with a bright young girl, Drey, who catches him doing drugs at school, and inspired by her, eventually tries to pull his life back together.
RYAN GOSLING, SHAREEKA EPPS, JEFF LIMA
Absolutely charming, real, intriguing, resonant small film about a Chicago art dealer who marries a rather mysterious man from the deep south, and then travels with him to meet his family. She stumbles upon a folk artist nearby, while he grapples with the legacy of a rustic life he may or may not have entirely shucked when he met her (Madeleine). But the real center of the film is Junebug-- Ashley, played by an astonishing Amy Adams, who is married to George's unhappy brother Johnny, and is completely infatuated with her George's new wife, Madeleine. (When Madeleine tells Ashley that she was born in Japan, she stares at him in stunned disbelief and says, "you were NOT".) Johnny has always felt that George was the prince of the family, privileged and favored, the golden boy, and he deeply resents it. Nor does that stop him from doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, a slight betrayal of Ashley that she enthusiastically forgives. It's George that knows what to do at the moment of crisis, and he, in turn, is disappointed by Medeleine. One of the most provocative and rich films on the relationship between the two solitudes in America, to this day.
EMBETH DAVIDTZ, ALESSANDRO NIVOLA, WILL OLDHAM, FRANK HOYT TAYLOR, SCOTT WILSON, BENJAMIN MCKENZIE, AMY ADAMS, CELIA WESTON
Fascinating and intriguing film about a pair of young Palestinians who are recruited to become suicide bombers in Tel Aviv. One of them has a girlfriend and has doubts at first, but, after things go wrong, his friend is the one with cold feet. Said and Khaled are childhood friends, garage mechanics, with an urge to make a dramatic profession of faith. There is a comic undertow, comfortably slipped into the details, as when the camera fails to start recording during the taping of a martyrdom video, or when one of the bombers includes a personal message to his mother about groceries. This was a Palestinian nomination for best foreign film in 2005. It's terrific.
KAIS NASHEF, ALI SULIMAN, LUBNA AZABAL, AMER HLEHEL
Incredibly audacious comic excursion into the repressed bigotted conscious in America. Is this offensive? Undoubtedly? Is it brilliant? Also undoubtedly. If it were not for the fact that it's hard to discount the racist comments made by unguarded subjects in the company of Borat, this film could be seen as simple Tom Green style rudeness. But the story itself, of Borat seeking his true love, Pamela Anderson, and seeking advice from a range of American types along the way, actually becomes sort of compelling.
SACHA BARON COHEN
Like Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, and Adam Sandler before him, Will Ferrell has surrendered to the odd compulsion of American comedians to take on serious dramatic roles in order to prove themselves worthy of serious critical appreciation. And as with the others, who are all well-established Hollywood personalities, he's not going to appear in a small, quirky, imaginative film--like "Being John Malkovich". It's got to be the big-budget spellbinder, the pseudo-serious Hollywood art film, concerned with the appearance of looking like a serious film. Harold Crick-- all of the characters have the last names of famous mathematicians-- starts hearing a narrative voice in his head. It belongs to famous novelist, Karen Eiffel, who is suffering from writers block, unable to bring her novel to an end because she can't think of a good way to off the main character. This should have been the basis for a clever-- at least-- exploration of identify and consciousness and sanity. Instead, it's what the producers think people think are identity and consciousness and sanity issues. But everything is external and there's not an action or line of dialogue that isn't contrived and safe and predictable, down to the disappointing ending, in which a supposdedly reputable literary scholar seems to assert that changing the fate of one character diminishes the literary value of the entire book. And this betrays how safe the movie plays it-- they just couldn't stand to have Harold die. This movie actually became quite boring and pointless very quickly.
WILL FERRELL, DUSTIN HOFFMAN, EMMA THOMPSON, QUEEN LATIFAH, TOM HULCE
In spite of the salacious premise-- a girl, in a moment of youthful impetuousness, performs oral sex on her dog-- this is a fine, astute film about honesty in relationships. Amy, pressured by her boyfriend John, finally reveals to him her dark secret. John is repulsed. Amy is understandbly flummoxed: you wanted the truth, now you can't take it. The consequences of this revelation affect her parents and her brother, whom they visit for the weekend, so John can ask her father for permission to marry her. Her "spiritual" mother has a revelation or two of her own, having to do with Elvis and Roy Orbison. Made for less than $50K (and looks it at times), it's a find example of why independent films should be made and should have their chance to find an audience. Incidentally-- how could Godlthwait have missed the opportunity: Amy's mom, not knowning what the dark secret was, goes to talk to John to try to smooth things over. She thinks Amy might have confessed that she wasn't a virgin. Why didn't she say something like, "Come on, John, she's not the first girl to do it. Hell, I'm not so innocent myself...."
MELINDA PAGE HAMILTON, BRYCE JOHNSON, GEOFFREY PIERSON, COLBY FRENCH, JACK PLOTNICK, BRIAN POSEHN, MORGAN MURPHY, BONITA FRIEDERICY
There is one joke in Apaclypto-- as the Mayan warriors and their captives approach the Mayan city-- a giant construction site in the middle of the jungle and history-- a worker inadvertantly fells a tree into the middle of the group, and one of the warriors shouts, "hey, I'm walking here". The rest of the film is humourless bloodletting and male suffering and absurdly preposterous escapes from various dire threats, including a panther (who gracious gives our hero, Jaguar Paw, a running lead before pursuing him at a precise pace, one step behind), lots of warriors, snakes, poisonous toads... why not have his wife and son in a pit? Slowly filling with rain? While she's having a baby? Jaguar Paw gets pierced by an arrow twice but still managers to outrun six healthy Mayan warriors. Enough already. The film is really a rather contrived thriller with unusually rich exotic historical and cultural detail. There's a reference here and there to cultural rot, but, thankfully, Gibson quickly retreats into chase sequences and thrilling scenery, a lot of which is digital, apparently. I am impressed by the commitment of the actors-- almost all unknowns-- to their parts, which mainly consist of moaning, screaming, or keening. It won't be much fun to savage this film because you can just picture Gibson's face: persecuted, stoic, resigned to his fate of misunderstood and hated prophet. Just incidentally-- Jaguar Paw returns to his village-- where are the children that waved farewell to the captives? They might, logically, have disappeared by then but it's a curious narrative gap-- Jaguar Paw's wife is still in the well. And alive. The situation cries out for some kind of resolution-- but then, Apocalypco is about scenes of brutality and suffering and fear-- not logical narratives. And why didn't his wife wait until the Mayan warriors had left before trying to climb out? And Jaguar Paw was too stupid to realize that staring at the well might tip off this captors to where his wife and child were hiding? And an eclipse occurred between the time Jaguar Paw was positioned on the stone for sacrafice and the priest raised his knife? And the panther waited for Jaguar Paw to descend the tree before attacking him? Courteous beast that... and Jaguar Paw had time to set the tapir impalement device while being chased in close quarters... oh never mind.
RUDY YOUNGBLOOD, ISRAEL CONTRERAS, ISRAEL RIOS, DALIA HERNANDEZ
Serviceable but somewhat pedestrian murder-mystery, written for Scarlett Johanson, and featuring the best performance of her short career. Otherwise notable for the fact that Allen doesn't get the girl and doesn't even get a romantic subplot, unless you count his tastefully cautious hovering over Johanson as "subplot". Allen is a musician, Sid Water, who inadvertantly sets up a meeting between beautiful journalism student, Sondra Pransky, and dead reporter Joe Strombel (Ian McShane). Sondra thinks she's on to a serious scoop-- famous, rich Peter Lyman is a serial killer. There's not a lot of tension in the question of whether he is or isn't-- just the passing amusement of solving a puzzle.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON, WOODY ALLEN, HUGH JACKMAN, IAN MCSHANE
A recent article I read in the New York Times discussed the fact that the cigarette makers ostensibly pay to advertise to teens warning them about the dangers of smoking-- in a very sly, subtle way, in which the hidden message is that smoking is one of the things that makes you more like an adult. Thank You For Smoking works on that level of intelligence, which is extraordinary. How tempting must it have been to make Nick Naylor a cartoon character, and a ridiculous villain. Instead, he is almost heroic because of the exceedingly clever ways he finds to spin news in favor of his clients, the tabacco industry. Why does he do it? Because he's good at it. Does he have a conscience? Maybe-- maybe not any more so than any average American businessman. When a reporter has a sex with him to help pry secrets of his activities for a news article, Nick is outraged. How could you do this? She replies with his same excuse: for my mortgage. Nick has lunch regularly with people with similar positions with the booze and gun industries. They discuss challenging events and television programs that make their clients look bad. The gun lobbiest remarks that when they become known as "merchants of death" through the news expose, his clients actually thought that might be a helpful nickname. I felt a bit let down by the ending because it suddenly targetted the government as a comically inept opponent of tobacco interests. For the first time, the device of Nick being wittier or smarter or more savvy than his media opponents ran a bit thin-- William Macy's senator was stupid beyond all plausability. I don't find it hard to believe that a lobbiest would be smarter than the government-- just that the government could not explain why risks associated with flying or eating food are different from the risks associated with smoking. The film also seemed to buy that the settlement with the Department of Justice lawsuits was a victory against Big Tabacco, when it clear was, given their prospects, a major victory, in which the tobacco companies were able to buy immunity from future prosecutions in exchange for a simple increase in the price of tobacco- passing on the costs to the consumer.
MARIA BELLO, AARON ECKHART, CAMERON BRIGHT, SAM ELLIOT, ADAM BRODY, KATIE HOLMES, ROB LOWE, WILLIAM H. MACY, ROBERT DUVALL
It is said that Altman himself had a severe gambling addiction in the 1970's. "California Split" is about gambling in America, and the gamblers and loan sharks and prostitutes that mingle on it's turf. Elliot Gould is Charlie, and George Segal is Bill, who meet at a poker game where they are accused of collaborating. In the parking lot later, one of the sore losers takes his revenge, and his money back. They form a partnership for a time, until Charlie disappears for a time, and Bill runs dangerously deep into debt. Classica Altman style, with overlapping dialogue and long telephoto lense shots-- this was the first movie to use 8-track audio recording for dialogue, and, according to one of the screen-writers, the recording engineer fainted on the second day of shoot, due to the stress of the job. Remarkable film by America's most remarkable directory.
ELLIOT GOULD, GEORGE SEGAL, ANN PRENTISS, GWEN WELLES, JOSEPH WALSH, BERT REMSEN
If I could go back to the first five minutes of the film, I would not believe I would end up giving it an 8 out of 10. If you can survive that first part, as you realize that it was shot with one camera, with almost no cutting, no effects, no sex, no violence, no explosions-- the story might begin to grip you. Will poor Mr. Lazarescu ever receive any treatment-- or a kind word or two-- as he is hauled from hospital to hospital in his deteriorating condition? Based on the true story of a man who was similarly hauled from hospital to hospital-- six times-- in Budapest, before being left to die on the street, the Death of Mr. Lazarescu is superbly acted and crafted, building quietly but steadily into a comment on medical science, on government and bureacracy, and on life itself. Amazingly, virtually nobody is stereotyped or caricatured. Most people involved in Lazarescu's neglect are neither cold-hearted nor stupid. Each of them merely contributes his or her own unique indifference to the litany of horrors suffered by the title character. The actors playing doctors and nurses feel so authentic, I had to check to make sure they were actors and not real medical personnel. The way they examined forms and talked over the patient-- it is all instantly familiar to anyone who has been in a hospital, even a good one. This is a terrific, low-key film without a single false note.
ION FISCUTEANU, LUMINITA GHEORGHIU, GABRIEL SPAHIU
Linklater has done some compelling films, and Fast Food Nation was a fascinating book. It should have ended up with something brilliant. Instead, Fast Food Nation is almost always interesting, and almost always disappointing. Dialogue is weak, the cinematography is pedestrian, and a lot of the interactions are coy and fey and pretentious. Fast Food Nation is about a Mexican husband (Valderrama, from "That 70's Show") and wife, and the wife's sister, who enter the U.S. illegally and end up working in a meat-packing plant in Cody, Colorado. They are confronted with some unpleasant choices along the way, and misfortune. That part is to tell us how workers are exploited. In the meantime, an employee of a fast food outlet joins a group of students interested in protest, while a boy in the same outlet considers robbing the place. There is an lesson here and it is not delivered particularly well. A lot of information is imparted, but at the expense of dramatic energy. I wanted to like this film but I didn't.
WILMER VALDERRAMA, CATALINA SAND MORENO, ANA CLAUDIA TALANCON, JUAN CARLOS SERRAN, GREG KINNEAR, MICHAEL CONWAY, KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, BRUCE WILLIS, PATRICIA ARQUETTE, AVRIL LAVIGNE, ETHAN HAWKE
Jose is a smart young boy growing up in Martinique in the 1930's. His mother has died and his grandmother, M'Man Tine looks after him. She is determined that he will get a better life than hers through education. She works in the sugar cane for subsistence wages. Jose is a bright, creative student and teachers Carmen, a sailor, in his spare time. They face many challenges especially when Jose has a chance to win a scholarship to a school in Fort De France, a large nearby city. The child actors are very good, and the wonderful sensual detail of their lives makes the story compelling. Lovely, charming film.
GARRY CADENAT, DARLING LEGITIMUS, DOUTA SECK, JOBY BERNABE
We expect this level of detail, the magnificent compute graphics, the grand scale now, when Hollywood does history. Eastwood is a bit of an over-rated director, and Flags shows it. Cliche's abound. Even worse, does Eastwood accept that Iwo Jima was of real strategic importance, an assessment that did not exist until after the battle, when the cost of taking it became clearly unacceptable? (The factual record shows that it was not used as a fighter base to protect bombers after all. Why not just go around it?) It should have turned out better than this. Eastwood had the guts to use unknowns in the lead roles-- now the studio is going to say "told you so". But the acting is pretty good. It's the story, purportedly questioning the meaning of "hero" that goes nowhere, because other than a facile exercise in mocking bureaucracies and propaganda, we don't see much of a difference between suckers who mindlessly obey authority and "heroes" in this film. There is a far superior excursion into this territory in "Thin Red Line".
RYAN PHILLIPPE, JESSE BRADFORD, ADAM BEACH, JOHN BEN HICKEY, BARRY PEPPER, JAMIE BELL
Superior acting and script in this story about a Puerto Rican ex-con who tries to go straight after a lucky break springs him out of prison about 30 years early. Unfortunately, too many of his former associates-- or young upstarts-- enter his life and when his lawyer, played very, very well by Sean Penn, needs him to help spring someone from Riker's Island, Carlito looks to be headed for big trouble. This is a genre film, but it's well acted and reasonably fresh, even if you can see the ending coming from a mile away.
SEAN PENN, AL PACINO, PENELOPE MILLER, JOHN LEGUIZAMO, VIGGO MORTENSEN, FRANK MINUCCI, JOSEPH SIRAVO, ADRIAN PASDAR
Perplexing, badly conceived story of a teacher, Frannie (Meg Ryan) who becomes distantly involved with the investigation of a murder, and attracted to the virile detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo) conducting inquiries. On the day of the murder, she happened to walk into the dark basement of a bar and see the victim, a prostitute, performing oral sex on a man. She notes the tattoo on his wrist-- perhaps from rather far away-- and flees, but can't help thinking about the encounter later. The detective takes her out and the movie indulges in the painful conceit of trying to sinulataneously maintain the allure of the detective while casting suspicion on him. It doesn't work very well, at least partly because Campion gets sidetracked by some of the sensational sexual content-- making me wonder about the fact that the most sexually explicit films often turn out to be made by women. Does Frannie want Ruffalo to chase her, to make her feel desirable, or does she court danger for danger's sake? Why on the earth the figure skating sequences? You can tell Campion was taking a risk there, but unfortunately, we admire risk-taking only when it results in something special. Oddly, the plot, on paper is more logical than the screen version, which sometimes looks utterly preposterous. Some scenes-- sex with her student-- come off as utterly gratuitous. It was also extremely hard to take your eyes off of Ryan's surgically inflated lips. And the next time someone complains about mail actors co-starring with actresses half their age-- Mark Ruffalo was six years younger than Ryan and looked it. Not saying that settles the issue, but...
MARK RUFFALO, JENNIFER JASON LEIGH, MEG RYAN, NICK DAMICI
Oddball movie that never really pulls it together, but has some very funny moments along the way. It's about an American Idol type show and focusses on three contestants, a Jew, and Arab, and a blonde American princess, who readily admits that she could never love anybody but herself. For a movie that looks cheap and trashy at times, there are some surprisingly, astutely funny scenes, as when Omer's terrorist handlers arrive in California to persuade him to strap on a bomb and go after the President, who has been invited to be an honorary judge for finale of the program. They end up in the jacuzzi, with Omer's aunt serving them grapefruit deserts. The send-up of Bush is quite charitable: he is seen as the puppet of a Cheney-Rove Svengali (Willem Dafoe) but has a epiphany and starts reading books and newspapers, and finally proclaims, on the tv show, that nobody will ever solve the problems in the Middle East. The most hilarious sequence involves the blonde's soldier boyfriend who decides to kill himself on the show. After he runs into the camera, setting off his bomb, the show switches to screen for viewers to cast their votes. Weitz had the good sense to let the audience not see the explosion-- the screen just goes blank.
DENNIS QUAID, MANDY MOORE, WILLEM DAFOE, JENNIFER COOLIDGE, SAM GOLZARI, CHRIS KLEIN, SETH MEYERS, JUDY GREER, SHOHREH AGHDASHLOO
Absolutely fabulous performance by Helen Mirren-- dignified, subtle, majestic-- as Queen Elizabeth dealing with the election of a new, populist, middle-class prime-minister, Tony Blair, and then the sudden death of Princess Diana. The Queen believed Diana's death should be barely acknowledged, if at all, by the Royal Family. After all, the stinging scandals and Diana's embarrasing disclosures to the tabloids and on television were still fresh in her mind. But as the British public clamoured for some kind of official commemoration, she rethinks her position. Blair urges her to play to the public, to address the correct image, as he himself scores a victory by proclaiming Diana the "people's princess". This is an extremely well-written, well-acted movie, which creates surprising tension in what is, after all, a question of taste. You are never quite sure how much the film-makers sympathize with the Royals, though, when Blair proclaims that someone should save them from themselves, it's hard to regard them as anything but immeasurably stupid-- especially Prince Phillip, who absolutely opposed any concession to popular taste. Diana herself is seen only through video clips, from the news, and we become aware of how clever she was as presenting an image to the public that may or may not have corresponded to the reality behind it. Remarkable film.
HELEN MIRREN, MICHAEL SHEEN, JAMES CROMWELL, SYLVIA SYMS, ALEX JENNINGS, HELEN MCCRORY
Chilling story about a 10-year-old girl named Rhoda Penmark who seems to be involved in some frightening events, and may even prove to be a murderer. The real-life girl it most put me in mind of is Mary Bell, the British child-murder, who killed two little boys at the age of 11, and appeared to be an astonishingly cold-blooded liar. Rhoda, played by Patty McCormick, is ingratiating and clever, and her mother begins to suspect things when she finds a valued penmanship medal in her daughter\'s \"treasure chest\" shortly after the boy who actually won the prize was found drowned. There\'s some amateurish psychoanalyzing and a good deal of agonizing over \"what\'s a mother to do\" but it\'s Patty McCormick\'s virtuousity that rivets you to the screen. Mother Christine eventually discovers that she was adopted, and that her mother was a suspected murderer, and she fears that she has passed on the evil to her daughter. The ending was altered from the book and play to comply with the Hayes code, and it isn\'t hard for an astute viewer to figure out what it should have been.
PATTY MCCORMICK, NANCY KELLY, WILLIAM HOPPER, HENRY JONES, EVELYN VARDEN, EILEEN HECKART, FRANK CADY, JESSE WHITE
Rivetting chronological dissection of the Enron scandal, how the company was put together by Delay, how Jeffery Skilling took it to new heights of bamboozelment, and how Andrew Fastow took the fall, in vain, for this massive flim-flam operation. The thesis of this film is that arrogance and pride led to Enron's downfall-- and greed, of course-- but how bad is greed if merely applied to legitimate business? That is a question not answered because Enron's downfall started with a prescient article by Bethany McLean at the Financial Post, who couldn't figure out where Enron's stock got it's value from. Excellent archival footage and audio files from Enron, phone calls, stock-holder and employee presentations, and testimony before congress, especially by Delay and Skilling. Anderson Consulting seems to have given short shrift, but that, perhaps, is a different movie.
Is this Scorcese's return to form? Not unless you thought "Taxi Driver" was all about the director. Has he just gotten lazy in his old age? "Departed" is an impatient film-- every scene cuts to the information Scorcese is afraid his audience won't absorb quickly enough. Thus, to telegraph that Billy Costigan is worried about being exposed, he vehemently denies, to Costello, that he is a cop. Yoohoo-- I'm not a cop. In the same way Colin Sullivan appears so eager to take charge of an internal investigation to find the mole in the police department. Naturally-- there is no explanation about why this particular police department chooses to have one of it's own investigate himself. Even worse, Scorcese resorts to some self-arm-twisting to wring some drama out of scenes in which I suspect a real person would walk away, like Madolyn chasing after DiCaprio to give him a prescription, instead of sensibly sending this abusive client to another counsellor, or, better yet, and more likely, giving him the news that he doesn't have to cooperate at all if he doesn't want to so he can quit whining about it. The relationship between Billy and Madolyn could have been managed-- if Scorcese hadn't been so eager to get them screaming at each other, to let the audience know that she's obviously in love with his deeply suffering higher consciousness, and he's obviously in love with the idea of her being in love with him... Everybody is gunning for an Oscar here, which is exactly why an astute viewer might start crossing them all off his list. Nicholson shamelessly mugs the Joker from Batman, Wahlberg and Damon rustle up some intensity, and DiCaprio is nothing but intensity, with no nuance or subtlety. Every scene is what the actors and director think the audience thinks it should be seeing. There's not a single revelation or moment of inspiration here, but I predict it will garner rave reviews from middling reviewers and IMDB pundits and win an Oscar for best picture, because some people unconsciously associate gruesome, explicity violence and name Hollywood actors with "authenticity". Scorcese here is imitating himself, via Tarantino. He even runs "Gimme Shelter" through the soundtrack for the third time-- no new music out there? Or is he just afraid of not playing to expectations?
MARTIN SHEEN, JACK NICHOLSON, LEONARDO DICAPRIO, MARK WAHLBERG, RAY WINSTONE, VERA FARMIGA, ALEC BALDWIN
The problem, 30 years later, is that the audience isn't fooled. Not for a second. But if you were fooled by the joke in this film-- it would have helped if they hadn't used such well-known actors-- it still would have been nothing more but a clever script. And that's about it.
MICHAEL CAINE, LAURENCE OLIVIER
Fresh and charming comedy about an dysfunctional family, who set out in a VW microbus to take little Olive to a pageant she has been "chosen" to enter. Dad's ill-conceived money-making schemes are going awry, but he still believes in his "9-point plan"; brother Frank has tried to commit suicide; son Dwayne won't speak until he becomes a military pilot, and grandpa is a cocaine addict. There's a few scenes that don't work, and some sloppy editing, but generally this film holds firm to it's indie ethos and gets out the quirk and the sweetness before you know it. Incidentally, nobody, up to now, has mentioned that the name of the financial adviser to Richard Hoover, Stan Grossman, is a character from Fargo. Is this a homage? And I do take issue with the erotic dance performed by a child that is supposed to reflected broad-minded enlightened amusement but might strike some, as it did me, as tawdry.
GREG KINNEAR, PAUL DANO, ALAN ARKIN, TONI COLLETTE, STEVE CARELL
Oddly compelling documentary about producer, and former actor, Robert Evans, who carries the picture with this bravado, cynicism, and disingenous faith in his own success. It's never clear exactly how big, or beneficial a role he played in successes like "The Godfather" and "The Sting" but he was clearly a central figure in many, many Hollywood moments.
ROBERT EVANS, EDDIE ALBERT, HENRY KISSINGER, JACK NICHOLSON
Modestly entertaining moral tale about a lawyer whow questions his firm's ethics when he discovers irregularities in a trust. He also happens to cut off a troubled father on the freeway, inadvertantly leading to a sequence of events in which the father loses access to his children. The father decides to seek revenge by holding on to a file belonging to the lawyer, which he discovers has some great value to the man, Gavin Banek. From there, it's an uneven by occasionally intriguing ride to a Hollywood finish, in which the moral connundrums are resolved and things are pretty well set right again. Sydney Pollack and Amanda Peet are worthy actors, but Affleck, as Banek, seems bland.
BEN AFFLECT, SAMUEL L. JACKSON, KIM STAUNTON, TONI COLLETTE, AMANDA PEET, SYDNEY POLLACK
Schultze is an older German man. Corpulent and quiet, his one indulgence is the accordion, which he plays well, and which he shows off once a year at a local music festival. He hangs around with two close friends, Jurgen and Manfred, he fishes, strolls around, drinks beer, and passes time fitfully and quietly. He visits his mother at a nursing home where he also encounters a rather deranged woman named Lisa who thinks she's French. Then one day, while changing stations on his old radio, he hears a snippet of zydeco music, and is infatuated with it-- though all he conveys through his eyes and mouth is a determined attachment. He plays it for his German friends but they don't much care for it-- except for his close friends who cheer him on good-naturedly. When he gets an opportunity to visit America, as a sort of good-will ambassador to his town's twin city, he leaps at the chance. Once there, he discovers that zydeco is no more beloved among the festival crowd there than it is in Germany, but, determined, he acquires a battered blue boat and embarks into the Louisiana Bayou. How do you describe this film? It's a lilting, gentle meditation on engagement and passion, through the eyes of a man who appears to have absolutely nothing of either. Schultz seems unaware of any omission in his life until he hears the zydeco, and then he seems utterly unable to articulate what it arouses in his soul. His friends are baffled but intrigued by his messages back from America. The Americans he meets seem to like him-- especially a black woman on a boat who cooks up some crab for him and steers him to a dance where he finally hears the zydeco music that first set him off, live. And he dances. Schultz is more charming than it sounds-- you keep thinking, boy, Hollywood just doesn't deal with this kind of thing: aging, social inertia, loneliness-- not seriously. A beautiful little film.
HORST KRAUSE, HARALD WARMBRUNN, KARL FRED MULLER, WILHELMINEW HORSCHIG, ROSEMARIE DREIBEL
Why has it become conventional Hollywood morality that a woman who chooses a career must be a cold-hearted bitch? She can't be a warm, exuberant, witty, fun girl-- she has to be a bitch. The likeable characters all happily, contentedly, delightedly surrender all of their aspirations to the cozy warmth of a snuggle with an inevitably unshaven slob. That said, "Prada" is sharp and entertaining, largely because Streep gives dimensions to Miranda, the relentlessly demanding editor, and the film entertains with details of her work. What a shame that they couldn't let the viewer decide, in the end, which choice is better. Instead, the message is delivered with heavy-handed acts of personal affronts, and Andy tosses her Blackberry into a fountain and flees back to her vacuous boyfriend with the perpetual 5:00 shadow.
MERYL STREEP, ANNE HATHAWAY, EMILY BLUNT, STANLEY TUCCI, RICH SOMMER
Savagely raked by many North American critics, "Les Choristes" is a fairly conventional "Up the Down Staircase", "To Sir with Love", "Mr. Holland's Opus" type story, set in a French boarding school just after World War II. There are a few sly references to Petain, but not much else specifically tied to the recent occupation. Clement Mathieu is a new teacher's assistant or Prefect at the board school and he actually cares about the boys in his charge. He decides to start a choir for them, and discovers that one of them has a brilliant voice. As in every standard rendering of this story, an authority figure has an irrational resistance to the idea of persuading boys to sing, and then, when it catches the ears of an attractive board member, tries to take credit for it. Had none of these other movies existed before it, this might have been a passably good film, a fine film. But the overt similarites really are rather hard to excuse, even if presented with a bit more sophistication than some of the American variants. The acting is pretty good, the costumes and sets are pleasant. In some ways, also reminds me of "Au Revoir Des Enfants", from a similar era, but "Au Revoir..." is a much better film. Also echoes of "400 Blows", though pales by comparison.
MARIE BUNEL, JEAN-BAPTISTE MAUNIER, THOMAS BLUMENTHAL, GERARD JUGNOT
A suprisingly effective Pierce Brosnan plays Julian Noble, a hit man, who meets Danny Wright, a failing businessman, in Mexico, takes a liking to him, and confides in him about his profession. Wright, it turns out, is facing a crisis and might be able to use a hit man. His wife, "Bean", just wants to see Julian's gun. This is an off-kilter comedy, which would have been better if they had only trusted their audience a little more. Instead, we are left with the odd suggestion that there is nothing wrong with killing people for money, as long as it's not someone we know. There is also a rather coy and pointless suggestion that Julian and Danny might or might not have had a "thing" for each other. Camera tricks, really: close up of the hand quickly touching a thigh, and so on. But was that supposed to be part of the suspense? Because there is not much else it could be. Matador is a fine movie, entertaining, and reasonbly tight, and it doesn't particularly remind me of any other film.
GREG KINNEAR, PIERCE BROSNAN, PORTIA DAWSON, HOPE DAVIS, PHILIP BAKER HALL
Bearable but pudgey thriller about a police chief whose soon to be ex-wife is a homicide detective who gets involved with a woman dying of cancer. When the woman and her abusive husband are killed in a fire, Whitlock (Denzel Washington) must deflect suspicion away from himself. Aside from the glaring unbelievablility of the plot-- he thinks he can actually erase any evidence of his link to the woman-- the movie chugs along smoothly to it's predictable finish. Eva Mendes is charming as the exwife, and John Billingsley is mildly amusing.
DENZEL WASHINGTON, EVA MENDEX, SANAA LATHAN, DEAN CAIN, JOHN BILLINGSLEY
Lesser Altman but still Altman, an interesting look at the behind the scenes activities at Keillor's "Prarie Home Companion" radio show, featuring musical artists, production staff, and the star, well-played as himself by Garrison Keillor. Not as edgy or interesting as, say "The Company" or "Dr. T's Women", but that inimitable Altman style, the superior performances (except for Streep and Tomlin's singing which doesn't go anywhere), and an angel (Virginia Masden) who intervenes, to no avail, when a Texas conglomerate buys out the station and threatens to cancel the program. It's a pity that Tom Waits and Lyle Lovett, who were intended for the roles of the singing cowboys, didn't make it. As with Nashville, Altman gives short shrift to the real talent involved in Country music, which, for all it's flaws, isn't something an actress like Streep can pull off successfully.
MERYL STREEP, LILY TOMLIN, JOHN C. REILLY, L.Q. JONES, LINDSAY LOHAN, WOODY HARRELSON, TOMMY LEE JONES, GARRISON KEILLOR, KEVIN KLINE, VIRGINIA MADSEN
I'm not sure what to make of this movie. Like a growing number of films, it has all the external makings of a quirky independent film, without necessarily having the intellectual or artistic vision you come to expect. Squid is about a couple of writers who split up, at a time when the father's career is in the doldrums and mom's career is just starting to take off. It's hard to take the portrait of the father seriously-- it descendes into ridicule and caricature at times-- and the two boys seem under-developed. But it has a raw, edginess to it that keeps it from going too soft.
LAURA LINNEY, JEFF DANIELS, JESSE EISENBERG, OWEN KLINE, ANNA PAQUIN
Felicity Huffman plays a man playing a woman: Bree Osbourne, who is part way into a sex change operation, which her doctor will not advance until she has resolved some personal issues? How? By setting out on a trans-american journey, of course, and running into assorted colorful and memorable people on the way, including her estranged son. Really not quite that bad-- a relatively entertaining diversion. There is a bit of a self-congrulatory aire about the film, as if nobody has ever done anything quite this shocking recently-- but they have, in fact. And like some of those films, Transamerica is smart enough not to call too much attention to moments when it thinks its being great. But some of the actions are not believable and some developments seem forgotten a minute after they happened.
FELICITY HUFFMAN, KEVIN ZEGERS, FIONNULA FLANAGAN, GRAHAM GREENE, BURT YOUNG
It's almost always a bad sign when a well-known actor writes a story and then stars in and-- worse-- produces the movie based on it. But Martin wants so badly to say something true and meaningful, and Shopgirl so studiously avoids every cliche and contrivance, that the result, in this case, is fresh and entertaining, and even meaningful. Ray Porter is a successful logician-- he works in software--who travels from Seattle to LA frequently by private plane, and is looking for more than sex: he sees Mirabelle (Claire Danes) behind the counter of a Saks's glove department and decides he wants to get to know her. He immediately makes it clear to her that he is not interested in marriage, and he wants them both to be free to meet others. We don't get enough about Mirabelle's life to give us a full picture. She is on anti-depressants. She is from Vermont. Her father is not very talkative. That she would even consider going out with Jeremy, the quintessential geeky, unkempt, insensitive guy she meets at a laundramat, tells you worlds about her life. She seems oddly friendless in the movie. Her only acquaintance seems to be Lisa, and Lisa is the movies' only condescension to cliche. She is the bad girl, and the bad girl wears too much makeup and uses sex toys. The story is odd and meditative. Ray Porter is revealled to be a man who has grave difficulties with intimacies, but to Martin's credit, he isn't a bad person. He genuinely cares for Mirabelle, and does tasteful, nice things for her, and probably, in the end, realizes that he has made a grave mistake. The characters well-rounded and rich. Best of all- they haunt. They touch upon basic, needful, human things.
CLAIRE DANES, STEVE MARTIN, JASON SCHWARTZMAN, BRIDGETTE WILSON-SAMPRAS, SAM BOTTOMS, FRANCES CONROY
Bizarrely over-rated story about a down-on-his-luck American who stumbles into an attractive bounty: find the head of Alfredo Garcia and bring it to a couple of henchmen for a rich Mexican man. Alfredo, you see, has impregnated his daughter. And Bennie (Warren Oates) happens to know Alfredo's former lover. And she knows that Alfredo is dead and buried in a cemetary in a small town. They set out to get the head encountering double-dealers, rapists, and thugs along the way, and Bennie kills them all. And then has the gall to blame the rich Mexican for inciting all the violence with this bounty on Alfredo. Poorly filmed, poorly written, and poorly acted-- it has the kind of bad technology some superb and intersting films are known for, and that must be the only explanation of why Roger Ebert, almost alone among American reviewers, gave it a favorable review. One reviewer claimed that Peckinpah was in a quest for truth-- "no matter what the cost". That's about the dumbest thing I've ever read about any movie, unless you count someone describing the shooting scenes as having a "hallucinatory grandeur", which, I suppose, is one way to label bad editing and cheap effects. It's not like he is wildly inventive without the money. He is without invention or money, or special effects, or any kind of logic. The only statement the film seems to be making is that even self-pitying psychotic thugs have a constituency out there who might really believe that they only kill people because they "have to" to prove that the world is a mess and evil triumphs.
WARREN OATES, GIG YOUNG, ROBERT WEBBER
Charming African film about female circumcision. Pretty well text-book advocacy film-making-- in a positive sense. Tells a story about young girls in a small town in Senegal who flee the ritual circumcision ritual and take refuge with Colle, a woman regarded with suspicion by the village because of her defiance of traditional women's roles. Colle gives the women a special magical protection called moolaade, which the village fervently believes in and demands that she remove. Colle had refused to allow her own daughter to be circumcised, which causes the village elder's son to break off his engagement to her. Meanwhile, the chief, angry at the feminist rebellion, confiscates all of the women's radios-- which become an emblem of modernization and rationality. Nicely told story, conventional in style but illuminating of a severely underrepresented culture in the world of film.
FATOUMATA COULIBALY, MAIMOUNA HELEN DIARRA, SALIMATA TRAORE, DOMINIQUE ZEIDA, AMINATA DAO
Painstakingly recreated flight of the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11, with the cooperation of the families of the victims-- which doesn't actually mean that the film is the truth. But there are oddities forced upon the narrative by this constriction, most obviously in the rather frank depiction of confusion and disorder on the ground. Nobody seemed to know who had the authority to order fighter jets into the air, or to shoot down a civilian jet-liner. Nobody was sure how many planes had been hijacked, and nobody knew where United 993 (which had been delayed) was headed to. Still, a valuable film, if not a great one. Well-acted generally. Unfortuantely, Greengras chose to use hand-held cameras, to convince us, I suppose, that we are "there". We're not.
THOMAS BURNETT, GARY COMMOCK, POLLY ADAMS
Intriguing portrait of the relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan at the height of success. Critics claim they have begun to repeat themselves and Sullivan believes it. He wants to work on a symphony or concerto, but Gilbert wants him to write another hit. But the film is not about the drama of their struggle for success-- it's really striving towards greater success-- but on the rich tapestry of relationships and environment in which they worked. Gilbert goes to an exhibit on the Japanese and so is inspired to "The Mikado", which appeals to Sullivan. It is rare that a film engages the viewer in the dramatic process without excessive contrivance or pretention. Very entertaining, rich, and delightful.
ALLAN CORDUNER, DEXTER FLETCHER, SUKIE SMITH, JIM BROADBENT, TIMOTHY SPALL
Jarhead is full of moments of what feels like a director's conception of what it must feel like to be a marine. There is sudden excurberance and cheering, and brutal initiation rites, and "shocking" diatribes about war and weakness and manhood. It never feels very authentic and relationships are not very fleshed out and "Jarhead" avoids platitudes, but, in so doing, avoids perspective. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Wofford with great conviction and determination-- but not necessarily much art. He's not a very good marine, but marines are there to kill people and to slap each other on the black and act like people who carry the burden of maintaining their own farce. Peter Sarsgaard is his spotter, Troy. Most of the other characters are stock, including the tough but fair Sergeant, the coward, the minority, the fanatic, etc.
JAKE GYLLENHAAL, JAIME FOXX, PETER SARSGAARD, SCOTT MACDONALD, KATHERINE RANDOLOPH
Extraordinary movie about two cowboys who fall in love with each other, but, for obvious reasons, can't live together. They marry, have children, work, but every year they spend a few weeks together "fishing". Their wives begin to suspect the truth. Works as a poignant love story, with superb performances, especially from Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams as his wife. A lot of scenes feel just right-- like Ennis' daughter asking him to come to her wedding, and Lureen explaining to Ennis over the phone-- and Jack's mother sending Ennis up to Jack's boyhood room. Striking score.
JAKE GYLLENHAAL, HEATH LEDGER, RANDY QUAID, ANNE HATHAWAY, MICHELLE WILLIAMS, VALERIE PLANCHE
Absolutely brilliant, mind-boggling film about race, in inimitable Lee style. And like many of Lee's brilliant films, deeply flawed-- yet unforgettable. Damon Wayans plays Pierre Delacroix, a black tv producer, whose boss, Thomas Dunwitty (Michael Rappaport) demands a hip hit. Everyone knows that black culture is cutting edge, so Pierre decides to resurrect a minstrel show, with Manray whom he renames "Mantan" and "Sleep'nEat" ((Savion Glover and Tommy Davidson). He holds auditions-- a brilliant, audacious sequence-- and brings a house band in, and Aunt Jemima and Junebug and others, and produces an absolutely repellant program that, of course, becomes a hit. There are big echoes of "Network" here, but also some utterly amazing, "in your face" revelations about race in America, including a brilliant sequence of old film clips and toys at the end that have surely been consciously or not suppressed for decades. (All apparently from Spike Lee's own collection). Some people-- not unexpectedly -- hated this film. Others loved it. I can understand both points of view, but I can't see how Lee's talent as a director/writer can be denied, and I can't see how anyone can avoid encountering the only films that comment honestlly on race issues in America today.
DAMON WAYANS, SAVION GLOVER, JADA PINKETT SMITH, TOMMY DAVIDSON, THOMAS JEFFER BYRD, MICHAEL RAPAPORT
Superior caper film-- and unworthy of Lee's talents. Clive Owen is great as Dalton Russell, a meticulous bank-robber with an unusual plan to rob a Manhattan Bank. Denzel Washington is Detective Frazier, a hostage negotiator, who tries to match wits with him. I often wonder what would happen in these types of films if the hostage takers would get serious about killing their hostages if the plane or bus isn't delivered exactly on time, but Lee takes a different route. Russell doesn't even seem all that interested in the money in the bank-- what is he after? Only Arthur Case, owner of the bank, knows, and he is desperate to keep that information from everyone else. Well acted and directed, and intriguing up to the point where the first hostage is "executed". Plummer is great as Case, but the "revelation" is a tired one. Foster is exceptional-- a more interesting character than she has played in other recent films.
DENZEL WASHINGTON, CLIVE OWEN, JODIE FOSTER, CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER
Oddly adult but miserably unaffecting tale about a pregnant woman whose family comes to help her out with a French divorce. Firstly, her sister joins her in Paris and has her own liaison with a French man, who of course, regards her as nothing more than a mistresss. A lot of commentary on French / American habits and values.
KATE HUDSON, NAOMI WATTS, JEAN MARIE LHOMME, LESLIE CARON, NATHALIE RICHARD, KATE HUDSON, NAOMI WATTS, MELVIL POUPAUD, GLENN CLOSE, STOCKARD CHANNING, SAM WATERSON
Earnest, beautifully filmed, but the script and acting are uneven. A real slice of India, dealling with Hindu traditions involving widows who, it is believed, should lead chaste lives after their husbands have died, dedicating their lives to his everlasting atonement. Even if the girl was a child bride who never even met her deceased husband, as in the case of Chuyia, who is suddenly taken from her home and locked up with a group of wisdows in Varanasi. When one of the younger widows, Kalyani, falls in love with young ambitious lawyer about to move to Calcutta, some of the older women want to lock her in her room. Her attempts to move out are complicated by the fact that some of the women have been serving as prostitutes to help pay for the their keep.
LISA RAY, SEEMA BISWAS, KULBHUSHAN KHARBANDA
Brilliant but flawed masterpiece about the battle to take Guadacanal from the Japanese in 1942-43, filmed in Malick's inimitable style. Thin Red Line is sprawling and sometimes diffuse, but never, for one second, uninteresting to watch. Odd that a such a filmaker's filmmaker would use so many name actors in bit parts. But he draws such good performances from them-- especially Harrelson and Cusack and Penn-- that it generally works. If there is a center to this story it is probably James Caviezel, as private Witt, who goes awol at the beginning and provides mystical reflections in his narration throughout. Some critics felt the film failed in the last hour, because it didn't stay with a single character or point of view. It definitely seemed a bit unfocused for the last 30 minutes-- mopping up the adventure, the way the soldiers mopped up after their successful advance to the west coast of the island. It also left the unfortunate impression that the viewer could identify with this continuous series of victories while meditating rather pointlessly on the pointlessness of loss, of war and conflict. Themes revisited with the same mixture of success and failure in "New World" seven years later.
JOHN CUSACK, JAMES CAVIEZEL, ADRIEN BRODY, SEAN PENN, JOHN TRAVOLTA, WOODY HARRELSON, DON HARVEY, ELIAS KOTEAS, GEORGE CLOONEY, JARED LETO, JOHN SAVAGE, BEN CHAPLIN
Er... didn't we see this film? We did-- it was called "Crimes and Misdemeanors". A man commits a terrible, violent act and, far from being constricted with guilt and remorse, goes on to lead a happy life. Life is fundamentally unjust and subject to random twists of fate. That's about it. So Match Point picks up the same theme, with Scarlett Johanson as the mistress who demands that her lover divorce his rich wife and marry her. That said, even Woody Allen repeating himself is better than 90% of the films out there, and it's a pleasure to watch an adult film-- adult in the positive sense-- people behaving reasonably, with the exception of that extraordinarily transgressive event that drives the plot. Even when Emily Mortimer suspects that Chris is having an affair-- beautifully realized. Mortimer is a superb actress who does vulnerability better than just about anybody. Johannson finally stretches her and gives her best performance ever-- but it's not as convincing as you might hope for.
SCARLETT JOHANSSON, JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS, ALEXANDER ARMSTRONG, MATTHEW GOODE, BRIAN COX, EMILY MORTIMER
Why is someone leaving video tapes at the Laurent's front door, which consist of a steady, unblinking, view of the front of their house. Nothing unusual happens. We watch with the Laurents and then draw back as they try to make sense of it. More tapes come, along with macabre child-like pictures of a person vomitting blood or having his throat slit. Now Georges Laurent is disturbed. Unlike "History of Violence", we observe our protragonist examine his own life-- what did I do that would have made someone so angry and hateful that they would torment us like this? Even George's wife, Anne, begins to wonder if George has been hiding something from her. When George spots a clue in one of the videos, he goes to visit the man he thinks is responsible, setting off a chain of events that ends in disaster. Contrary to "Crimes and Misdemeanors", Cliche asserts that you cannot escape an evil deed,; in it's own way, it is every bit as convincing, but ultimately Woody Allen is right: life is not just. It's a bit difficult at times to accept that Georges would not develop some kind of rationalization for what he did so long ago, and cling to it as we all do, in the belief that somehow we can always and inevitably will define ourselves as virtuous.
DANIEL AUTEUIL, JULIETTE BINOCHE, MAURICE BENICHOU, ANNIE GIRARDOT, BERNARD LE COQ
Disappointing product of collaboration between Wachowski brothers and an Alan Moore comic--who actually condemned the movie. John Hurt is the snarling oppressor, the dictator who is so ridiculously evil that it's very, very hard to take him seriously for one moment. You just know that the dictator would sound more like Hal in 2001 nowadays. I tried to give the idea the benefit of the doubt-- a throwback? A comic book perspective? Or just plain dumb. But even dumber is the idea that a savvy girl like Evey would put up with V's brutal "programme", in which he treats her the way he believes the government treats its people, to purify her for the battle-- without her knowledge or consent of course. So how is he a liberator? With these two critical pieces at odds with the thrust of the story, it's hard to muster any excitement when V does set out to blow up the Parliament buildings. We just know that a few years after the events in the movie, it will be V on tv extolling the virtues of his view of society. Brownie points for the unusual take on "terrorism"; pity it doesn't really have anything to say about liberty or social justice. Portman tries hard... alas.
NATALIE PORTMAN, HUGO WEAVING, STEPHEN REA, STEPHEN FRY, JOHN HURT, TIM PIGOTT-SMITH, RUPERT GRAVES, CLIVE ASHBORN
The somewhat surprising wedding can't rescuse this pastiche from the tedium of watching one long extended meet-cute inverted: here they part cute. I just couldn't care enough about the Julia Roberts character to feel that it mattered one way or the other, though, if she had simply burst into tears at the very end instead of dancing with her gay friend...
JULIA ROBERTS, RUPERT EVERETT, DERMOT MULRONEY, CAMERON DIAZ, PHILIP BOSCO, M. EMMET WALSH, RACHEL GRIFFITHS
This is a very strange horror epic that never seems to gain any momentum, primarily because Grendel just isn't very scary. He appears to be a large, energetic man, and not even remotely monstrous, and the fear and paralysis experienced by the Danes seems wholly out of proportion to Grendel's actual appearance. King Hrothgar in particular enters a kind of depressed funk because of his inability to track down and kill the troll-- but it's hard for even an empathetic viewer to believe in his helplessness. Beowulf comes from Iceland and tries to save the town, but Grendel has no beef with the hero-- he wasn't the one who killed his dad. Shades again of 9/11, as we consider that King Hrothgar has a past for which he may be paying. Sarah Polley plays an oddly gratuitous role of a witch, scapegoated by the community, who is friendly to both sides. She fails to convey anything of the sense of desolation you would expect her character, Selma, to have experienced-- she's didn't just move to the suburbs, after all. All of this is supposed to be okay because part of the point of the story is that the hero myths are just that-- meant to comfort, not inform. So an Irish monk, Brendan, makes his appearance, heralding the spread of monotheism-- he succeeds in baptizing most of the village-- and the twilight of the gods. Intriguing at times and atmospheric because of the bleak filming locations, Beowulf & Grendel is flabby and unfocussed.
EDDIE MARSAN, INGVAR EGGERT SIGUROSSSON, STELLAN SKARSGARD, BAROUR SMARASON, GERARD BUTLER, SARAH POLLEY, STEINDOR ANDERSEN
Entertaining if derivative comedy about a gay boy growing up in a very macho family in Montreal in the 1970's and 80's. Zac Beaulieu has a big problem with this father, but an even bigger problem with this brothers. The main problem with this film is that Zac gives himself off as "oppressed", unjustly, of course, by his parents and society because... well, he doesn't actually do anything gay. So he wants it both ways. He is persecuted because he's different, but he doesn't seem to want the audience to be turned off by his actual gayness.
MARC-ANDRE GRONDIN, ALEX GRAVEL
Keira Knightly is the most beautiful woman alive but she can't do more than provide pleasant ornamentation for this interesting but ultimately unsatisfying version of Jane Austen's melodrama. What keeps it interesting is astute direction, a sense of humour, and restraint. It's not actually all that bad really. It has a heart and the ending is not unsatisfying.
KEIRA KNIGHTLY, MATTHEW MACFADYEN, TALULAH RILEY, JENA MALONE, DONALD SUTHERLAND, BRENDA BLETHYN
Also written by George Clooney. Filmed in black and white, in claustrophobic editing rooms and camera bays, an intense study of Ed Murrow's famous confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy at time, it must be remembered, when leading politicians like President Eisenhower were afraid to take him on. Murrow, with the tentative backing of William S. Paley, chaiman of CBS, did a series of stories about McCarthy's unjust persecutions of various army and government personnel. The movie taps into the famous confrontation with Joseph Welch at the Senate committee hearings (the ones that finally investigated McCarthy). David Strathairn, the wonderful sherriff of "Matewan", is marvelous as Murrow-- dry and intellectual, but resolute. "Good Night and Good Luck" alludes to modern times with several pointed jabs at the danger of a docile, unquestioning media, and television that seeks to endless entertain rather than enlighten.
DAVID STATHAIRN, ROBERT DOWNEY JR., PATRICIA CLARKSON, RAY WISE, FRANK LANGELLA, JEFF DANIELS, GEORGE CLOONEY, GRANT HESLOV
This is a fine, fine film right up to the confrontation between Josey and her fellow workers and father at the union meeting. It is based on the true story of the the first class action sexual harassment lawsuit ever instituted in the U.S. Josey and several other women are pioneers in working at the mine (the result of court-ordered steps taken by the mining company), and she and the others are subject to relentless sexual and physical harassment. Unlike Glory, who learns to turn aside the provocations with humour and thick skin, Josey decides to take action. Caro unwisely chooses to tell a parallel story about Josey's son, the product of a rape in high school. The scenes in which the son rebels, and then is corrected by Josie's friend Kyle, are wooden and excruciatingly contrived. But the scene in which Josie's father finally comes over to her side at a raucous union meeting is raw and authentic. Charlize Theron is excellent, as is Richard Jenkins as her dad. Had it not been for the unfortunate diversions, and the appallingly unrealistic courtroom resolution-- Bobby Sharp confesses the horrible truth right on the stand, after being throttled by Josie's lawyer, Bill White. Curiously, the real life Josie-- Lois Jenson-- didn't like the book, "Class Action", that the film was based on, but did like the film. The generous sampling of Bob Dylan songs on the soundtrack is a treat, but how could they have left out "Is Your Love In Vain" with this chorus: Can you cook and sew/make flowers grow...
CHARLIZE THERON, WOODY HARRELSON, SEAN BEAN, SISSY SPACEK, RICHARD JENKINS
Tedious and predictable "thriller" about a mother, Jodie Foster, who gets onto a plane with her daughter after the death of her husband and wakes up from a snooze to find her daughter missing, and a skeptical flight crew increasingly reluctant to believe her. The mother also happens to be an engineer who worked on the design of the jet. And if you find that hard to belief, try to explain why anybody ever got involved in this sorry plot. What's with Jodie Foster? She seems to have an affinity for big-budget films that look good only on paper. This, by the way, is really a remake of the far superior "Lady Vanishes" by Hitchcock.
JODIE FOSTER, SEAN BEAN, PETER SARSGAARD, ASSAF COHEN, Max Von Sydow, Sverre Anker Ousdal, Goran Stangertz, Eva Von Hanno, Charlotta Larsson
Charming film that depends for it's life on the charms of Kate Dollenmayer, who is in almost every scene, hemming and hawwing her way through failed relationships and bad dates and disappointments. Struggling to find her way into post college life. Very, very low-budget, and very rough sound. Almost now incidental music or effects. But has a compelling sort of authenticity to it-- Marnie sounds exactly like many young women I know. A wry alternative to Hollywood constructs.
KATE DOLLENMAYER, JENNIFER SCHAPER, ANDREW BUJALSKI, CHRISTIAN RUDDER
Impressive, sensual portrait of Cuban ex-patriat poet Reinaldo Arenas, based on his memoire of the same name, which he completed shortly before his suicide while in the late stages of AIDS in New York City in 1990. Traces his early life in the countryside, his growth as a writer, his intensifying conflicts with the Castro regime, his arrests and his eventual escape to the U.S., where his new life was somewhat less than the idyllic refuge he had imagined. In real life, Arenas was somewhat more political than the film portrays him, possibly because his criticism's of Castro might be perceived differently if weighed against the experience of El Savador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala. Well-acted, well-written, and beautifully filmed, and tragic.
JAVIER BARDEM, OLIVIER MARTINEZ, JOHNNY DEPP, MICHAEL WINCOTT, OLATZ LOPEZ GARMENDIA, SEAN PENN
Very odd mix of superb cinematography and clumsy, ackward, embarrassing scenes of fey joviality between the two main characters; disjointed narrative, mumbled phoney gravitas from Colin Farrell. And the eternally fascinating story of the Indian princess, Pocohantos, who, at the age 10, led a group of braves delivering food to the starving pioneers at Virginia's first settlement, and turned cartwheels, naked, in the town square in the summer, in competition with the boys. Eventually, she was taken "hostage" (though treated well) by the settlers, who wanted to make a deal with her father. John Smith, the white settler she falls in love with, leaves for further ambitions (telling Pocohantos, through a friend, that he is dead). She marries John Rolfe (Christian Bale) and travels to England where she is a sensation, meeting King James and the court. She catches a disease and dies. But here is where Malick loses his way. The first half of the movie addresses the illusions the Europeans have of progress and civilization, showing the Algonquin to be more advanced in most respects than they are. The second half almost belies that theory, revelling Pocohantos' acceptance and celebrity. It's probably a gesture of reverence for Pocohantos herself, but comes off as the praise of faint damnation. Even her baptism and marriage are shown as peculiarly logical. The voice-over is a big mistake. It intrudes everywhere, clearly demonstrating that Malick had little faith in his own imagery. Q'Orianka Kilcher is brilliant as Pocohantos (she is never called Pocohantos in the film) but many scenes with her gambolling with Smith are trite and hokey. Farrell, inexcusably, mumbles all of his lines a al Brando, and there is the occasional hand-held affectation during action scenes. This is a failure, but an interesting one. It seems less and less interesting the more I think of the voice-overs.
Q'ORIANKA KILCHER, COLIN FARRELL, CHRISTIAN BALE, CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER, JONATHAN PRYCE, AUGUST SCHELLENBERG, JOHN SAVAGE, DAVID THEWLIS
Under-rated picture of sibling rivaly, lost parental love, and pulling yourself together. Cameron Diaz is actually quite effective and Toni Collette is too, in this well-written, well-directed romance. In the end, as in Shakespeare, even the nymphs marry, but the characters are original enough and convincing enough to take us along for the ride. And the old folks are quite entertaining-- Maggie and Rose's grandmother lives in a retirement home. Fortunately, Hanson had the good taste and restraint to spare us an excess of the most obvious jokes. Still, it would have been a better film if he had spared us the faux breakup of the engagement at the end, just to put some tension into the script.
TONI COLLETTE, CAMERON DIAZ, ANSON MOUNT, RICHARD BURGI, SHIRLEY MACLAINE
Jo and her boyfriend Ted and his brother Fred rob corner grocery stores and sit around watching television. She's also taking a creative writing course where she has a friend. One day, she meets a Czech immigrant named Luka, (who's job offer in Montreal has vaporized) while shop-lifting in a drug store and they form a tentative bond. Dry and sometimes funny, and extremely low-budget, "Looking for Leonard" never really takes off but it provides a few diverting moments, as when Ted asks Jo where her mask is while they're robbing a store, or when Ted chases Luka with a gun. Generally well-acted. Colouration is a bit weird-- I'm guessing because of the low budget. Justin Pierce, who played a likeable squeegee buddy to Luka, hanged himself shortly after the film completed. It is likely they couldn't afford to use any actual Leonard Cohen songs in the movie (or he denied permission), which is disappointing, though the rest of the sound track is actually quite good. And why, with all the swearing, was there not a even a slight glimpse of flesh?
KIM HUFFMAN, JOEL BISSONNETTE, BEN RATNER, JUSTIN PIERCE
Famous American adaptation of Seven Samauri, fairly true to the spirit of the original, with sweeping western vistas and colourful Mexicans instead of Japanese villagers. Better than I expected for the era, for a western, and a veritable cornucopia of future stars, including Vaughn, Cobourn, McQueen.
STEVE MCQUEEN, ELI WALLACH, CHARLES BRONSON, ROBERT VAUGHN, HORST BUCHHOLZ, JAMES COBURN, YUL BRYNNER, BRAD DEXTER, VLADIMIR SOKOLOFF
Also written by John Milius, though credit is disputed. This is a lovely, stately film about a genuinely fascinating category of adventure: 19th century mountain men, who fled civilization to live in the treacherous and harsh environment of the Rocky Mountains. They faced hostile Indians, Grizzly bears, blizzards, and other challenges. Redford plays a the legendary "Liver-eater" Johnson, who appears to be more of a composite character rather than closely based on the real man (who died in an old-age home in California in 1900). Jeremiah leaves civilization after a war, and the movie alludes to his distaste for human companionship. He meets several other wild mountain men, and through one of them becomes married to a native woman. Beautifully filmed. The fight scenes seem a bit dated, but this is a fine film. But... Pollack's direction here seems at times stale and stiff. The fight scenes don't have the intensity you would expect from two men fighting to the death. The narration is limp, and the songs are even worse. Apparently Redford insisted on removing scenes from the script that depict old "Liver-eater" earning his nick-name, and his relationship to Swan seems almost quaint at times. When he tells her not to annoy him, you can tell the old lug doesn't mean it. The violation of the Indian burial grounds is designed to tell you that even though they murdered his wife and child, the Indians are not mindless brutes. In real life, some of them, like Europeans, were. The material is no naturally inviting of reverence, however, that you almost instinctively want to ignore the fact that movie does have it's flaws, and most of them have to do with the PG rating.
ROBERT REDFORD, WILL GEER, DELLE BOLTON
Is this a 9/11 film? Is this film intended to provide the viewer with the vicarious thrill of seeing their hero use torture and sadistic violence to exact justice against a nebulous group of conspiratorial bad guys? With the reassuring knowledge that the hero, Creasy, never inadvertantly hurts someone who didn't deserve it. And even if he did-- who cares? Pita-- the name itself!-- is just so damn cute, it only seems right and good that Creasy commits acts that make him no different from the bad guys, because he's our sonofabitch! It is telling that he helps her sabatoge her piano lessons in favor of swimming. It's just somehow more wholesome and patriotic to favor athletics, always, over intellectual or artistic accomplishment, as in "The Ice Princess". Deviants study hard and study ballet. Normal people kick ass in sports and belch. Doesn't shock me that this film employs rock-video and and advertising stylistic devices-- the wandering camera, the layers of distorted images, the jump-cuts, etc., -- to create the kind of orgiastic sense of an adolescent dream, right down to the Christ-like sacrifice. And the creepy sexual overtones. The Mexican husband is revealed to be corrupt, so the blonde, American wife becomes sexually available-- never overtly, of course-- but clearly, unmistakably, to the hero. (I later discovered that, indeed, a sex scene had been filmed with Creasy and Lisa). And Creasy's relationship with Pita isn't like surrogate father, and definitely not older brother, and not uncle-- just creepy. As in many films like this, they want it both ways: Creasy is so smart and so tough and so manly that he is a good protector (he kills four of the kidnappers before they wound him and take the victim), but he is also patient and kind and indulgent in ways that you can't imagine a good body-guard being. That's because this film is utter fantasy. It's an anti- Munich, and anti-Syriana. There is no question about the humanity of the bad guys, because, after all, they hurt one of ours. Creasy is like Christ- loving and kind and compassionate, and a merciless, pitiless judge of evil. Amazing. And that's why the suffering of Creasy is so offensive. It's the result of happenstance and accident-- because it would be sick if he wished it upon himself without it being part of his qualities as a body guard-- but if it weren't there, you could never accept his treatment of the men he tracks down (cutting off fingers, shoving explosives into one's ass). He would be a monster. He clearly is a monster, but the audience is sucked into the comforting illusion that he is our monster, committing these acts on our behalf. And that's where this movie is utterly democratic: it's the violence we choose to approve of, against the world, against those who would commit acts of violence against us. Best double feature with: History of Violence. Scott, I just discovered, also directed "Crimson Tide" and "Top Gun". Now do you believe me...
DENZEL WASHINGTON, DAKOTA FANNING, RACHEL TICOTIN, MICKEY ROURKE, MARC ANTHONY, RADHA MITCHELL, CHRISTOPHER WALKEN, GIANCARLO GIANNINI
This is a mixed bag. Starts out with some interesting writing and acting and an intriguingly off-beat premise-- a former athlete becomes an on-line betting expert because of his astute picks-- and then converts it's idiosyncracies into liabilities by disregarding its own internal logic and going for some kind of emotional payoff that just doesn't arise from the characters or story. Pacino is so interesting to watch you almost can't tell if he's acting or playing a schtick. Even if it is a schtick, it's a superior stick. McConaughey as the former athlete, with the magical ability to pick winners, is intense and fresh until he is dragged by the script into a somewhat preposterous circumstance. Rene Russo, a co-producer, just can't pull off the requirements of her role--- she's just not that mesmerizing to justify Lang's interest in her, or Walter's bizarre emotional wager.
MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY, RENE RUSSO, AL PACINO, ARMAND ASSANTE, JEREMY PIVEN, JAIME KING
I'm not sure what to make of this. It's the story about Nora, whose father is dying of cancer, and Ismael, a cellist locked in a relatively luxurious insane assylum. They are former lovers, and she wants him to adopt her son. Nora has ghosts in her closet-- the death of the father of her son, Elias, and her subsequent marriage to the dead man to give Elias legitimacy. Her sister Chloe is a wreck. Her new husband seems to be a bloodless entrepeuner. She seems to be an attractive, self-possessed woman, but all of that is called into question by the end. Well-acted and intriguing but sometimes slow-moving.
EMMANUELLE DEVOS, MATHIEU AMALRIC, CATHARINE DENEUVE, MAURICE GARREL
Terence Malick spent two years editing this film, after shooting all of it in Alberta, at dusk or dawn only. He abandoned his script and had his actors generally improvise, and it shows, and it works. But this is also one of the most exquisitely photographed films I have ever seen, and should be seen in the theatre if at all humanly possible. Both Nestor Alemandros and Haskell Wexler worked on the cinematography, which is literally stunning. Even Richard Gere is serviceable, though Linda Manz, as his younger sister Linda, steals the show with her dry, shrewd narration, and Brooke Adams is compelling and more beautiful than lovely. Concerns migrant workers who help a wealthy but lonely Texas land-owner harvest his grain. He falls in love with Abby (Brooke Adams), whom Bill (Gere) has been passing off as his sister. This leads to complications and ultimately tragedy, when Bill gets an idea for extricating himself and Abby from poverty. Doug Kershaw makes an extraordinary appearance as a fiddler. Saw again in 2023: yes, an utterly beautiful, compelling film, with extraordinary sequences of grain harvest many steam-powered tractors and threshers. Just exquisite.
RICHARD GERE, BROOKE ADAMS, SAM SHERPHERD, LINDA MANZ, STUART MARGOLIN, ROBERT WILKE, DOUG KERSHAW
Powerful film based on the memoirs of Robert Baer, a former CIA agent, about the incestuous relationships between oil, politics, and big business in the U.S. and the middle east. George Clooney is a CIA analyst working in Iran, who gets taken, on the sale of a guided missile, and recalled to the U.S. The narrative then shifts to Bennett Holiday, an auditor investigating irregularities at a large oil company that really believes that profits are utterly sacred and everything else is a matter of buying people off. A pair of young Palestinians face the frustrations of life as refugee workers in an anonymous Arab state. Matt Damon is Bryan Woodman, a futures buyer and seller, who develops a connection with an Arab state ruling family through tragedy, and inadvertantly gets mixed up in intrigue as the father's health declines. No quarter is given. The movie follows its own trajectory without apology, without stopping to offer explanations no character within the movie could reasonably expect to acquire. This is an important film, that is about what our elected governments are probably really up to.
AMR WAKED, CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER, JEFFREY WRIGHT, CHRIS COOPER, MATT DAMON, AMANDA PEET, ROBERT FOXWORTH
Spielberg has finally completed a movie in which his cinematic talents are allowed to unfold without a last minute desperate lurch into the sentimental. This is the story of Avner, a Mossad agent recruited to inflict Israeli justice on anyone they can find who is associated with the kidnappings and murders at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Avner assembles a team and, with information largely supplied by a private rogue French intelligence agency, proceeds to assassinate their targets one by one. As the Palestinians, in turn, inflict new casualties on Israel, and other western powers, Avner begins to question his role. Where does this cycle take us? This is a gutsy movie for Spielberg, and one that is sure to make him more unpopular than ever with conservatives. But the movie crackles with suspense and narrative drive, and the major characters are richly multi-faceted. One of the best movies of the year.
ERIC BANA, DANIEL CRAIG, CIARAN HINDS, MATHIEU KASSOVITZ, HANNS ZISCHLER, GEOFFREY RUSH, MATHIEU AMALRIC
Better than average comedy about two attractive, charming men who go to weddings to pick up girls who are swept up in the emotions of the moment, and therefore vulnerable. Really, like many other romantic comedies, an update of Midsummer Nights Dream, and really, like many other modern comedies, it wants to have it both ways. We enjoy the men picking up and casually dumping attractive women in the first half, but we can't go home until balance has been restored, the men have learned their lessons, and fall in love and marry. The first half is satire-- based on real behaviours of real human beings-- the second half is unconscious satire, a parody of how we like to think we see ourselves: behind that facade of casual, mindless sex, we are really are sensitive, kind human beings who just want love and family and a home. It's a pity that one of the two didn't continue on in the vein of the first half-- which would have have the second half satirical. We get Chas, instead, (Will Farrell), who is so broadly sketched, you can't take him seriously even as a genuinely farical element. He is celebrity relief. The principals are charming and Rachel McAdams is, as always, a stunning little scene-stealer who does a better job than anyone in recent memory of making you believe she really likes someone or wants them. Owen Wilson merely has to appear on screen to be funny and charming, and the secondary characters are also well-played. Entertaining and funny, and just barely manages to restrain itself from becoming sentimental at the end. No it doesn't-- but Will Ferrell brings welcome relief to the wedding, with the two women he picked up at a funeral.
RACHEL MCADAMS, HENRY GIBSON, DWIGHT YOAKAM, RON CANADA, VINCE VAUGHN, OWEN WILSON, ISLA FISHER
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