Photography by Rebecca D’Angelo

Web Exclusive… Film Reviews By Bill Newcott Bill Newcott, entertainment editor for AARP The Magazine, host of the Movies for Grownups® weekly radio program, and a former New York and Los Angeles film critic, presents his film reviews

Life@50+ 2008 Feature
Join host Bill Newcott and award-winning actress Alfre Woodard for the Movies for Grownups Film Festival at this year's AARP Life@50+ member event in Washington, D.C., Sept. 4–6.

Despite Hollywood's infatuation with youth, half of movie tickets are bought by people over 30. "Youth-oriented movies make or break themselves on their opening weekends," says Movies for Grownups® host Bill Newcott. "But three of the highest-grossing movies of all time—the grownup-oriented My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Dances with Wolves, and A Beautiful Mind—never reached number one at the box office. How did they manage that success? It was thanks to mature audiences, who kept those movies in the theaters for months."

July 2008

Sony Pictures

Step Brothers (R)

Someone had a funny idea, and somewhere along the way someone sucked all the funny out of the idea. That left just an idea, and what resulted was Step Brothers, a film in which everyone acts like they’re doing really funny stuff, but the stuff they’re doing is neither a) funny nor b) interesting.

Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, two of the most dependably funny guys in the movies, play middle-age slackers so stunted in their emotional and intellectual development that, far from funny, it borders on the sad. Ferrell’s mom and Reilly’s dad get married in the first reel, and for some reason mentioned in passing, the two men wind up having to share a bedroom, a là Wally and Beaver. They, of course, hate each other from the start, which could be funny, I suppose—except for the fact that we hate them even more.

They do all sorts of mean, gross, borderline illegal things to each other, until one of them does something mean to someone else, which for another unclear reason makes them really, really like each other a lot. Then they get mad at each other again. You won’t see two stars work harder at delivering the goods than Ferrell and Reilly. But since they helped write this mess, it’s hard to sympathize with them.

The worst part of all this, the absolute shame of it all, is that the parents are played by two truly wonderful grownup actors. Mary Steenburgen, who won an Oscar all those years ago for Melvin and Howard, almost never gets to play roles deserving of her attention, and that dismal track record continues here. And if there’s a God in heaven, Richard Jenkins will get an Oscar nomination this year for his truly wonderful, breakthrough performance in The Visitor. In this case the two sit there, usually at a dinner table, watching the whole miserable endeavor crumble around them, wondering when the funny is going to show up.

Universal Studios

Mamma Mia! (G)

It was Greece I was looking forward to seeing in Mamma Mia!, the new movie musical based on the long-running Broadway show. You know: the crystalline waters, the impossibly blue sky, and the rocky landscape. But I came away awestruck by an equally astonishing natural wonder: Meryl Streep.

Whatever Streep is eating these days, that's what I want. I want it intravenously, and I want it run through an atomizer so I can inhale it. I was raised not to discuss a woman's age but come on, at 59 Streep out-sings, out-dances, and out-charms a cast that must average nearly half her age. For crying out loud, at one point she leaps onto a bed, bounces nearly to the ceiling, and in midair touches her fingertips to her toes. Of course, should it turn out that feat was accomplished with hidden wires, then color me gullible—nevertheless, hers is the most inventive, energetic, luminous performance you'll see this year.

Streep plays the free-spirited owner of a struggling bed-and-breakfast on a Greek island and the mother of beautiful young bride-to-be Sophie (radiant Amanda Seyfried). Unbeknownst to her mother, Sophie has perused Mom's long-ago diaries and has identified three men from a certain summer who could be her biological father. Convinced she'll know her dad at a glance, Sophie invites all three of them (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård) to the wedding.

On that skeleton of a plot are draped a multitude of vintage songs by ABBA—a collection of pop earwigs that have over the past few decades relentlessly burrowed their ways into our brains. Honestly, I walked into the theater thinking I didn't know any ABBA songs, but here they came, clobbering me about the head and neck with their infectious hooks and impossibly tight harmonies, faithfully re-created by the movie cast, most heroically by Streep and her two onscreen buddies, Julie Walters and Christine Baranski. Oh no—just writing about them is causing a flashback. Take a chance on meeee! Out, damned riff! See that girl! Watch that scene! Dig in the Dancing Queen! It's hopeless. By the time Streep pops up after the story's fade-out, approaches the camera, and demands of the theater audience, "Do you want another one?", we're putty in her hands. In full glitter regalia, the trio of women—along with their good-sport male costars—ramp up a slam-bang rendition of "Waterloo," apparently the one ABBA song even the resourceful screenwriters couldn't shoehorn into the plot. Waterloo—couldn't escape if I wanted to… Heaven help us all.

In the end, it all comes back to Streep—wondrous, miraculous Streep. It seems awfully late in her legendary career to call anything she does revelatory. But here she reignites not just herself, but the entire movie musical genre.

Picturehouse

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (G)

There's nothing startling about the new family film Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, and that’s a huge part of its charm. Like the enormously popular doll it’s based on, this is a film to be held and hugged. No tragic life lessons here, no saga of kids having to grow up too quickly. It’s the world from a little girl’s perspective, and it’s not at all a bad place from which to see things.

If you know a little girl, you probably know at least something about the American Girl dolls. Toy stores are fully stocked with the likes of Addy, the Civil War girl; Kirsten, the pioneer girl; and Kit, the Great Depression girl—and bookstore shelves are brimming with kid novels based on each of them. Kit lives in the Midwest in the 1930s, and while at first her family seems blissfully immune to the economic catastrophe erupting around them, all too soon Dad finds himself heading off to Chicago to find work, and Mom must take in boarders to make ends meet. That endeavor introduces a new cast of colorful characters into Kit’s life, among them a mousy librarian (Joan Cusack), a former flapper (Jane Krakowski), and a friendly—if somewhat creepy—magician (Stanley Tucci).

While the girls in the audience will immerse themselves in Kit’s attempts to get herself published in the local paper and solve the mystery of some stolen jewelry, for grownups the great fun in Kit Kittredge is watching this cast of pros totally buy into what is, in the end, a piece of juvenile fiction. Tucci's magician plunges into his act with tireless bravado, and hobnobs with his fellow boarders as if he were in one of the great courts of Europe. Cusack invokes every adorable quirk she can muster, flitting about the plot like a bird with one good wing. And perhaps most welcome of all is the wonderful Wallace Shawn—you remember him as the villain in The Princess Bride who keeps shrieking "inconceivable!"—as a blustering newspaper editor.

Young Abigail Breslin—an Oscar nominee for the quirky masterpiece Little Miss Sunshine—plays Kit. She’s plucky to a fault, in the great tradition of young screen heroines dating back to Shirley Temple, and, before her, the Gish sisters. Her infectious optimism—and the bottomless wells of kindness she finds in those around her—may seem anachronistic in an age when movie children are forever being tormented by demons, real or imagined. The children and adults of Kit Kittredge’s Great Depression exist somewhere between the hyperrealism of The Grapes of Wrath and the mindless optimism of Annie—faces set to the future, hearts hardened to the notion of failure.

Some may quibble with that outlook, and how the movie presents children with a sugar-coated vision of an episode that nearly tore apart the fabric of America. But the imagined past can be powerful stuff. It often informs us of how we wish we'd responded to the winds of history, and of how we might want to act should they blow back this way again. In that sense, the history we choose to remember, like the Depression world of Kit Kittredge, can be every bit as instructive as the unvarnished truth.

June 2008

Disney/Pixar

WALL•E (G)

Very well made but not very good, WALL•E, the newest animated film from the wizards at Disney/Pixar, has most of the qualities that made Pixar’s first eight movies instant classics: delightful characters, breathtaking detail, and hilarious sight gags.

It also has one thing the first eight did not: a meandering script that loses itself in a maze of lazy plotting and inelegantly choreographed action sequences.

But don’t blame the title character. WALL•E (pronounced “Wally”), is an adorable little robot with one mission in life: to wander a decrepit, trash-strewn cityscape, gather and compact the garbage into neat cubes, and pile it into neat stacks that eventually grow to dwarf the buildings that surround them. Poor WALL•E is all alone. It seems that the good people of Earth have so littered the landscape that the planet has become uninhabitable. So the humans have all taken off in a giant spaceship to live in weightless comfort until the ’bots they’ve left behind clean up the mess.

The mission was supposed to take five years—but now it’s been 700, and WALL•E, toiling away, is the sole surviving worker.

So far so good. The first 20 minutes of WALL•E are dazzling. WALL•E, a cube-shaped, tractor-treaded, binocular-eyed elf, rolls from job to job, stacking his trash cubes to dizzying heights and humming to himself, of all things, “Put On Your Sunday Clothes” from the musical Hello Dolly! I could have watched WALL•E at work for the film’s 90-plus minutes, but too soon an interloper arrives: a shiny egg-shaped she-bot named Eve. She steals WALL•E’s heart—and soon becomes unduly obsessed with a small sprig of plant he gives her.

The pair, and the action, abruptly shift to the distant spaceship, and it’s there that WALL•E begins to fall apart at the rivets. What helped make the previous Pixar films so eminently watchable was their crisp, clear storylines. Toy Story’s Buzz and Woody competed for the love of a little boy. The rat of Ratatouille wanted to be a chef. The father fish in Finding Nemo wanted, well, to find Nemo. The characters of WALL•E, in contrast, are just stumbling along. They haven’t a clue about what’s going on, and neither do we. In the end, we learn that all the hubbub has something to do with getting the sprig of plant through the sliding door of some kind of automated biomass identifier. That meager payoff comes only after endless chases and moments of peril—punctuated, admittedly, by some truly gorgeous set pieces, including a romantic deep-space ballet involving WALL•E and Eve.

But WALL•E’s problems go far beyond a convoluted plot. For a film by Pixar, there are uncharacteristic misfires all over the place. The film’s backstory—how the planet got junked and where everyone went—is clumsily told by a live-action video of character actor Fred Willard. Now, Willard (Best in Show, Everybody Loves Raymond) is one of the funniest guys around. But what business does a filmed actor have in a lavishly animated movie? There’s an air of desperation when, as society collapses around him, Willard’s presidentlike character flashes a victory sign and chirps “Stay the course!”—a soon-to-be dated swipe at G.W. Bush. The garish spaceship (and its grossly overweight, self-indulgent, trash-manufacturing inhabitants) serves as yet another in a long line of tsk-tsk’s from Hollywood regarding America’s endless cycles of consumption (the very economic engine, by the way, that keeps Hollywood executives purring along Rodeo Drive in their Humvees). Perhaps most galling of all is WALL•E’s blatant product placements: More than once the film slips in blatant—albeit comical—bows to computer maker Apple, whose CEO, Steve Jobs, also happens to be co-founder of Pixar.

To be fair, from any other animation shop, the worst moments of WALL•E would be considered great leaps forward. But Pixar has gladly accepted the mantle of gold standard in animated films. It’s the curse of the undefeated thoroughbred to one day come up lame out of the gate. WALL•E is Pixar’s Big Brown: beautiful to look at, with an impeccable pedigree, but for once, somehow unable to make it across the finish line.

May 2008

New Line Cinema

Sex and the City (R)

If Iron Man was the summer's premier chest-thumping, testosterone-powered he-fest, then Sex and the City is its frilly, chatty, pajama party counterpart, soaked in estrogen and served in a cocktail glass with one of those cute little umbrellas sticking out of it.

Full disclosure: I never, ever watched Sex and the City when it was a TV series, so my familiarity with its seminal story line is based solely on what I read and heard from diehard fans during its six seasons on HBO. Going in, I figured that's probably enough. And besides, any good movie should sweep the viewer along, regardless of his (or her) familiarity with the source material. Right? Right?

Well, maybe not right. Here's my plot synopsis: A gang of four women who are in their 40s and 50s, yet who dress as if they're on their way to the junior prom, strut menacingly along crowded New York sidewalks, four abreast, making everyone get out of their way, rattling off dialogue that they seem to have rehearsed by telephone the night before. The group seems to include a thoughtful one (Sarah Jessica Parker), an all-business one (Cynthia Nixon), a refreshingly sweet-natured one (Kristin Davis), and a lusty one (Kim Cattrall). The last lives in California with a handsome, vacuous actor, yet she pops cross-country to Manhattan for Starbucks lattes with her pals with the regularity that you or I head for the kitchen. Two of them are married with children, yet really the husbands are wallpaper-like in their blandness, and as for the kids, in the women's day-to-day hierarchy they seem to rate just below new shoes and just above a nice chilled shrimp salad. (When one friend suggests that the gals all jet off to Mexico in the morning, one proud mom protests "But I have a job!"—not "But I have a little boy who needs to be fed!")

The thoughtful one is getting married to a guy who, back in the show's cable TV days, was known as Mr. Big (see, something did filter through to me during those years). He mumbles a lot and has kind of dead eyes, but she loves him in part because he installs a humongous walk-in closet for her in the new penthouse they share. The film's dramatic highlight occurs when she ceremoniously removes a new pair of cobalt blue shoes from a shopping bag and gingerly places them on the new closet's shoe rack. No kidding. In fact, the case can be made that film's posters should bill Christian Dior, Oscar de la Renta, and Jimmy Choo as co-stars.

Now, for me, the above details convey every good reason to run screaming from the theater. For millions of others, they serve as thrilling reassurance that Sex and the City has made a seamless transformation from small screen to big. Good for them. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get some new shoes at Payless.

P.S.: I added a star to this week's ranking, just to allow for the fact that I didn't understand anything that was going on.

Paramount Pictures

Iron Man (PG-13)

Let’s hear it for the middle-aged superhero! He’s in pretty good shape for a guy his age, but showing signs of the usual wear and tear. He’s settled into a path of least resistance in life, love, and career, only dimly recalling the idealistic visions he held as a kid.

Things seem pretty darn good to him, and then it happens. Something awful, something traumatic—something that reminds him that life is not only fleeting, but it also requires frequent reassessment of where it’s going. And at that revelation, he turns his life around on a dime, infusing it with meaning, mission—and for the first time, real power.

That’s the story of Tony Stark, the hero of the spectacular new action film Iron Man. Stark is a smug, super-rich weapons company mogul who seems to be sitting on top of the world—albeit a world that he is arming to the teeth, without regard to who the good guys and bad guys are. As played by the ever-inventive Robert Downey Jr., Stark is a quirky, twitchy kind of guy who, on a sales pitch mission to the Middle East, has that self-satisfied grin wiped off his face by an insurgent attack (fueled by rockets he manufactured) that very nearly kills him.

It would spoil much of the fun to relate how Stark escapes from his terrorist captors, but his ingenious plan results in him returning to his epic cliff-top mansion and creating a truly awesome full-body metal suit—virtually indestructible, armed to the teeth, and capable of cool Superman-like flight—in which he will do battle with evildoers the world over. The new superhero, streaking through the sky and blowing away baddies like Mr. Machine gone postal, somehow assumes the name Iron Man.

By now you’ve caught on that this is pretty much a man’s movie. The fantasy of donning a magic suit that renders you powerfully immune to the steady onslaught of age—and superhuman to boot—has irresistible appeal for those of us who last managed a decent lay-up sometime before the turn of the century. When the film’s Iron Man suit was revealed in a sweeping, body-length pan shot, the male element of my preview audience broke into spontaneous applause. Even the film’s heroine, Stark’s personal assistant (a truly stunning but underutilized Gwyneth Paltrow), is a prototypical damsel in distress, at her boss’s beck and call while draped in fashions made all the more eye-catching by her classic contours.

Despite all the pyrotechnics, what makes Iron Man a true treat for everyone in the audience is Downey’s performance. He’s one of the few actors whose off-screen misadventures—a real-life soap opera of drug use, jail time, and erratic behavior—seem to feed his movie roles in a positive way. His vulnerability, even as the high-living Tony Stark, is palpable. Men see him as a guy’s guy who finally gets his act together; women see him as an endearing bad boy who really just needs a tender hand to guide him. And right now, in his mid-40s, Downey—and by extension, Stark—can be perceived as a guy teetering on the brink, redeeming himself and his career at the last possible moment. That’s a valuable lesson for the potential superhero in all of us.

ThinkFilm

Then She Found Me (R)

Co-writer/director/star Helen Hunt proves three things with her new big-screen comedy, Then She Found Me. As an actress she remains one of our top-tier, too-seldom-seen performers; as a first-time feature director she admirably wrangles her dream cast with a steady hand; and as a writer she should hire somebody to tell her when the sixth or seventh plot twist is just one too many.

The unfolding plot of Then She Found Me seems, at times, to require a scorecard. Hunt plays a nondescript schoolteacher whose unremarkable life suddenly begins taking one unexpected turn after another, including, in no particular order, abandonment by her husband, a sudden death in the family, a surprise love, a spontaneous reconciliation, an unexpected pregnancy, and the sudden appearance of a long-lost mother in the person of Bette Midler (who claims that our heroine was the result of a one-night stand with Steve McQueen). Any one or two of those devices would pretty much do as a sustained story line—and indeed, they all have a special resonance for a grownup audience. But here, as each new plot element piles onto those that came before, it all becomes downright numbing. Finally, when the story takes a truly heartbreaking turn, we—and the characters—virtually shrug it off.

Still, Then She Found Me's script weaknesses are nearly redeemed by one of the most appealing casts in recent memory. Hunt is bravely willing to trade her willowy beauty for an emphatically downtrodden demeanor, her careworn face frozen in a frown that her character wears with a seeming sense of entitlement. Matthew Broderick, who ought to be downright despicable as her off-to-the-races hubby, is so dumbly charming that we half hope she'll take him back. Colin Firth turns up the English charm to an irresistible level. And as the suddenly resurfaced mom, Midler starts out a tad too frenetic, but soon settles into a nicely rounded performance as a woman who desperately wants to tell the truth, but finds lies so much more interesting.

For her first outing in the director's chair, Hunt proves she can move a story along. I hope she directs some more…but she should really be spending more time in front of the camera, too.

April 2008

Fox Searchlight

Young@Heart (PG)

"Should I stay or should I go now?/If I go there will be trouble/And if I stay it will be double"

To millions of fans middle-aged and younger, those words from the punk rock band The Clash evoke the angst of a troubled lover. But put those words in the mouth of a 92-year-old woman, and they take on a haunting poignancy, a meditation on life’s advancing twilight: one foot here, one trembling foot tracing a path somewhere beyond.

Young@Heart, a truly enchanting documentary about a Massachusetts chorus of singers in their 70s, 80s, and 90s, is brimming with such breathless moments—but also with astonishing energy and good humor.

Eileen Hall is the 92-year-old London Blitz survivor who tackles the Clash number. She’s the oldest member of the group, which numbers roughly two dozen. The number keeps changing, partly because new members become chronologically eligible all the time (and you thought that invite from AARP when you turned 50 was unnerving!) and inevitably, because others leave for health reasons, temporary or permanent.

British director Stephen Walker follows the group for seven weeks, during rehearsals leading up to a performance in their home town of Northampton. Along the way, they pound out versions of David Bowie’s “Golden Years,” James Brown’s “I Feel Good,” the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” and, for the film’s true shocker, The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” With each performance, it’s like hearing the lyrics for the first time.

One highlight planned for the concert is a duet of “Fix You” by the rock band Coldplay, sung by two engaging guys named Fred and Bob. For reasons I’d best let the movie explain, by opening night the duet has become a solo. There sits Fred—his oxygen tank hissing softly in the background—singing the song’s words of loss and regret: Lights will guide you home/And ignite your bones/And I will try to fix you.

The song ends in a solemn silence, and then, like a crashing wave, the audience on the screen leaps to its feet in applause. If I weren’t such a jaded movie reviewer, I would have joined them.

Sony Pictures Classics

Married Life (PG-13)

There's something stubbornly nostalgic about all the smoking going on in Married Life, a drama set in 1949 and masterfully acted by the immensely appealing foursome of Chris Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, and Rachel McAdams. Here are all these smart, accomplished people and all their friends, happily puffing away, blithely oblivious to the fact that they are living not only dangerously, but suicidally. They're very good smokers, too—the cast has clearly mastered the lost arts of taking a thoughtful drag between phrases, emphasizing important points with a quick jab of a smoldering butt, and the remarkable trick of letting loose a dense little swirl of smoke and then, with a swift intake of breath, pulling it back in. That last stunt has special dramatic significance in this wonderful little film, as the characters seem forever on the brink of blurting out important revelations, only to withdraw them at the last possible second.

Cooper, one of our most reliably brilliant actors, plays a buttoned-down executive with a problem: He's madly in love with a vivacious young blonde (McAdams, whose irresistibility is manifest) but considers himself too soft-hearted to break the news to his wife (the likewise delightful, if chronologically more advanced, Clarkson). So he muddles on, seeing his girl on the side while professing love for his wife, in a sordid little scenario that he has somehow convinced himself is heroic. He confesses all this to his best friend (Brosnan), a confirmed bachelor who also happens to become smitten the instant he meets his pal's illicit beloved.

Soon the friend begins scheming to get the girl for himself, the guy's wife is revealed to be a tad less stoic than we first thought...and the philandering hubby himself decides the best way to spare his dear wife the humiliation of divorce and abandonment is to, well, kill her.

Married Life easily might have veered off into one of two all-wrong directions: It could have become a dark comedy, with tragic misunderstandings and black-hearted motivations played strictly for nasty laughs. Or it could have been played as a film noir, a Postman Always Rings Twice knockoff that would ring as hollow as virtually all latter-day efforts at the genre (the Coen brothers notwithstanding).

Happily, director-cowriter Ira Sachs falls into neither trap. He repeatedly surprises us with unexpected turns. Under his measured hand, the proceedings become a meditation on marriage itself—the ebb and flow of passion, love, and companionship—and on the pains and rewards that can come to those who must choose whether or not, in the words of Brosnan's worldly playboy, "to build their happiness on the sorrow of others." The finale is neither grimly stark nor overly sentimental—but as bittersweet and satisfying as, I imagine, a nice new pack of Chesterfields used to be in the old days, before we knew better.

Twentieth Century Fox

Horton Hears a Who! (G)

Exquisitely animated it is, but the real reason to soak in the new screen version of Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! is some of the most inspired voice work I've ever heard in a cartoon—and you're getting this from someone who has at least sampled every major 'toon made since Winsor McCay took a pencil to Gertie the Dinosaur back in 1914.

Forget the computer animator's fetish for every-little-hair detail, and forget even the astonishing character animation, which uncannily captures the expressions and mannerisms of the soundtrack's real-life actors. With voices like these, directors Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino could have given us a blank screen. Jim Carrey's Horton—the elephant who discovers an entire city of little beings living on a speck of dust—is a playground of childlike inflection, his tone plying the spectrum from wonderment to petulance to indignity. Steve Carell's performance as the Mayor of Whoville—the guy with whom Horton communicates through a jerry-rigged drainpipe—includes occasional tonal references to his role on TV's The Office: that patented, halting free-association riff that brands him the thinking man's idiot. But Carell also spins off into the relatively uncharted territories of warm affection (for his 96 daughters and one son) and unfettered panic.

The rest of the cast is sterling, as well. There's Carol Burnett, stuffy and sniffy as the mean old Kangaroo (and given a nice bit of redemption at the end); Arrested Development's Will Arnett as a Bela Lugosi-inspired vulture named Vlad; Knocked Up star Seth Rogen as Horton's sidekick pal (a small rodent-type critter, the exact type of which I didn't catch); and perhaps best of all, as the narrator who gives voice to Dr. Seuss's ageless rhyme, the incomparable CBS News Sunday Morning host Charles Osgood. That kind of care in voice casting would animate even a science class slide show. Augmented by the gloriously rich palate of Horton, the stars end up giving some of the best performances of their long careers.

March 2008

Sony Pictures

21 (PG-13)

Movies about card players are almost always boring for me. Sorry, but it's true. Even last year's Lucky You, with no less star power than Robert Duvall, Eric Bana, and Drew Barrymore, left my eyes glazed over as I tried to follow the vagaries of poker. Invariably, directors of these films will resort to the old "shifting eyes" shots—extreme close-ups of each player's face, the eyes darting back and forth, the nearly inscrutable squints supposedly cluing us in as to just who is winning and who is not.

So the best thing about 21, the new movie about a team of supersmart MIT students who sufficiently perfect their card counting technique to take it to the big leagues, is that halfway through I felt I actually understood not only blackjack but how to effectively cheat at it. Of course, on the way home that night I realized I understood absolutely nothing—but the neat trick pulled off by director Robert Luketic and his wonderfully appealing cast was in lulling me into the false sense of insider-ness, as if I were privy to all the secrets and smarts necessary to stick it to The House.

Based on the nonfiction book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, 21 is, well, the inside story of six MIT students who took Vegas for millions. The youngsters on hand are wonderfully attractive and admirably earnest—in fact, Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, and Aaron Yoo are entirely too gorgeous to ever successfully blend into the scenery of a Vegas casino, as any good card counter must in order to remain undetected. But the film really belongs to Kevin Spacey as the team's mentor, a smoothly sleazy MIT math professor who uses his position to spot promising new talent. Spacey's considerable charm works its magic on the kids—and on us—so effectively that when he shows himself to be less than the youngsters' best buddy, well, we're pretty much as shocked as they are. Likewise, Laurence Fishburne as an old-school casino security guy keeps us guessing as to his true motivations. But he brings such a sense of authority to every role he plays, each apparent mutation in his character's approach to the card-countin' kids is utterly believable.

You probably won't come away from 21 ready to clean up in Vegas. But you will enjoy a couple of hours with some pretty sharp customers, and perhaps develop some newfound admiration for that weird high school math teacher who always seemed to be hiding something.

SenArt Films

Bonneville (PG)

Buddy pictures rarely bring out the artistic best in their stars. The Rat Pack movies were hardly the finest dramatic hours for Frank, Dean, or Sammy. And even the recent, well-received Bucket List was essentially a showcase for co-stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman to have the time of their lives together.

But friendship flicks featuring top-line actresses (think Thelma and Louise) don't come along very often. So it's nice to report that Bonneville—featuring Oscar winners Jessica Lange and Kathy Bates and three-time Oscar nominee Joan Allen—is a consistently entertaining opportunity to watch three of the screen's most gifted women enjoy one another's company while more or less slumming it through a rather routine road flick.

Lange plays a recent widow from Idaho who is begrudgingly delivering her late husband's ashes, at his resentful daughter's demand, to a memorial service in Santa Barbara, California. She could fly there, but instead she and her two pals decide to make the trip by automobile. The car they end up driving is—you guessed it—hubby's vintage Bonneville convertible (although Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats do make a cameo appearance, as well).

That's pretty much the plot. We're more or less plopped down in the back seat listening in on the trio's conversations, watching them cavort like school kids on a motel waterbed, and standing by as (spoiler alert: this is one of the film's more surprising twists) the ever-entertaining Bates is courted by a dashing Tom Skerritt. The dialogue by first-time screenwriter Daniel D. Davis rings more true than most interfemale banter we've been forced to sit through in the movies, and you'd expect nothing less from three actresses who have spoken some of the most lyrical scripts of the past decade or so. And second-time director Christopher N. Rowley keeps the story moving along when it could threaten to bog down in just-us-girls hijinks.

Bonneville might not make the final cut of its stars' lifetime achievement reels, but it's clear they've seldom had more fun on the set. For the audience, their obvious delight is contagious.

Focus Features

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (PG-13)

Remember the Oscars? Remember how 90 percent of the movies honored that night were about as jolly as a puppy's funeral? Well now, the lighter-than-air comedy Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day would seem to be Hollywood's chipper chuck to the chin, a friendly "cheer up, old boy, life's not all that dour!"

The wonderful Frances McDormand is the title character—a down-on-her-luck London governess who finds herself hopelessly unemployed at the outset of World War II. She finagles a position in the household of a bubbly American starlet (Amy Adams, most recently the star of Enchanted) and soon finds herself swept into the vortex of her new boss's, shall we say, complicated social life: three handsome suitors, all bent on marrying her, none aware that the others exist.

It's all veddy British, and veddy funny. The trailers seem to focus on the abundant pratfalls and exaggerated double takes that are part and parcel of farce, but there's something much more substantial afoot here: As the relationship between the women deepens and the strict rules of Britain's class system melt away, shadows of the coming, more egalitarian post-war Western world seem to unfold before our eyes.

Oscar-winner McDormand provides the much-needed anchor for all the door-slamming and wild misunderstandings. And Adams—sweet and sexy in a way most actresses can only dream possible—continues to emerge as one of the screen's reliably endearing stars. If Hollywood really is rousing itself from a grumpy night's sleep, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day could not be a more delightful wake-up call.

February 2008

New Line Cinema

Be Kind Rewind (PG-13)

As warmly wonderful and endlessly inventive as any movie you'll see this or any year, Be Kind Rewind is a big, sloppy kiss on the face of humanity, a comic fable infused with genuinely felt notions of brotherhood, community, and old-fashioned decency.

A kindly old neighborhood merchant (Danny Glover) goes on a trip, leaving his modest Passaic, New Jersey, video rental shop in the hands of two good-hearted but hopelessly inept friends, Jerry and Mike (Jack Black and Mos Def). Almost as soon as the shop owner leaves town, Jerry, through an outrageous series of events, has accidentally erased every VHS tape in the place. (The proprietor, knowing most of his customers are still stuck with their old VCRs, hasn't moved on to the DVD age.) Terrified that they've destroyed their friend's business—the city is already threatening to condemn the dilapidated storefront—Jerry and Mike set about trying to re-create each lost movie using a vintage '80s camcorder.

First up: Ghostbusters. We see the guys setting up each scene, their low-budget, lower-tech approximations at once charmingly amateurish and oddly auteur-ish. The iconic Ghostbusters scenes are all there: the haunted library (filmed using unsuspecting patrons at the Passaic branch), the "We're ready to believe you!" TV ad (with Jerry and Mike squeezing behind a cardboard cutout TV, their fingers pointing well beyond the plane of the TV "screen"), the demon in the refrigerator (a neighborhood cat). Of course, the first customer—a marvelously encouraging Mia Farrow—isn't fooled for a second. But she shows the tape to friends, who start a snaking line of customers pounding on the video shop door, demanding that the pair make more "à la carte" versions of their favorite movies. And so Jerry and Mike crank up production, turning out cut-rate versions of classics like King Kong and 2001: A Space Odyssey—plus lesser home video favorites like Rush Hour 2. Their endless ingenuity echoes the earlier work of Be Kind Rewind's writer-director Michel Gondry himself, who in movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep has always preferred to rely on complex yet nondigital effects to depict wild flights of imagination.

Of course, every movie needs some sort of conflict, so an officious movie studio representative (Sigourney Weaver, who could well step right back into her sultry Ghostbusters role as the sexy Gatekeeper) shows up to shut down production. But Gondry's really not interested in human pettiness: the studio rep, tough as she is, is no villain. She sincerely believes in her responsibility to protect her clients' rights. Likewise, the Passaic city officials who want to demolish the video shop only wish to create a better city for their citizens, and even the kindly old merchant they're displacing never argues otherwise. In Gondry's world, everyone is out to make the world a better place; everyone wants to find some way to get along; and everyone gets a pass when it comes to ulterior motives. It's a fairy-tale land, for sure, but in a society that at times seems to go out of its way to construct the most artificial of conflicts, Gondry's Passaic is also a lovely place to visit.

The neighborhood's ultimate plan to save the shop, hopelessly naive and doomed from the start, is portrayed nevertheless as a noble crusade. We buy into it completely, and it doesn't hurt that Gondry throws in some shades of It's a Wonderful Life for good measure. If the story ends on an ambiguous note, there's no doubt of Gondry's vision: The qualities of innocence, trust, and honesty, ridiculed and dismissed by a cynical world, are in fact the only traits that can ultimately redeem us.

Paramount Pictures

The Spiderwick Chronicles (PG)

As one born in the Bronx, I hereby wish to protest mightily the tendency among filmmakers to forever place Bronx and Brooklyn accents (and be honest, is there a difference?) in the mouths of the uncouth, the creepy, and the disgusting. I’ve just come from a screening of The Spiderwick Chronicles, a dizzyingly busy screen adaptation of the kids’ book series, and let me put it to you this way: As the cute-as-a-button family unit involved, the always-lovely Mary-Louise Parker and the well-scrubbed kid actors Freddie Highmore and Sarah Bolger could pass diction muster on Beacon Hill. But as for the hordes of demonic toad-like creatures who noisily terrorize them, well, let’s just say their scenes brought me back to my boyhood days in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium. Worse, the moment they open their mouths, their scariness is undermined: they sound like refugees from a Raid insecticide commercial (and, come to think of it, their demise is kind of like that, too).

It’s worth mentioning only because what could have been a totally immersive movie experience is largely spoiled by director Mark Waters’s choice to follow that well-worn voice-casting road. Visually, The Spiderwick Chronicles is quite unlike anything you’ve ever seen. The story of a magical book, discovered by a lonely boy in the dusty attic of a remote country house, has remarkable charm. The book, you see, opens his eyes to a universe of fairies and gnomes (and also somewhat less pleasant beings) invisible to the vast, inattentive mass of humanity. And that’s a sweet little lesson: The world around you is full of wonder, if only you’ll look for it.

And director Waters does conjure up some truly wondrous, if too-brief, glimpses: dandelions that sprout faces, a magnificent flying griffin, an adorable gnome peeking from behind a coffee can. These are truly jaw-dropping moments, and the art of computer animation, now taken utterly for granted by all of us, has seldom been more seamlessly accomplished. Young Highmore—who, had he been born a generation earlier, would have been Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger in Oliver!—jettisons his emphatic British accent to play not one all-American boy, but twins. It’s a somewhat unnecessary plot device that may play better in the books than in the movie, but the special effects and stunt-double work involved in putting forth the two Freddies are absolutely convincing. And two wonderful grownup pros, David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck) and Joan Plowright (Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont) bring much-needed poignancy to the proceedings as a long-separated father and daughter. Never mind the chronological complications—he’s 59, she’s 78. That particular twist is one of the most charming elements of the film, and if that’s not reason enough for you to spend some time thumbing through The Spiderwick Chronicles, well, then, fuhgeddaboudit.

Warner Bros.

Michael Clayton (R)

Late January-early February is absolutely the dregs when it comes to new movie openings (unless you're champing at the bit to catch the Hannah Montana concert flick), so we can thank Warner Brothers for re-releasing last year's underseen thriller Michael Clayton. By all means get a hold of the DVD when it comes out, but if you can, first rush into a theater to immerse yourself in Tony Gilroy's riveting meditation on the daily tiny compromises we make, and how by midlife they can accumulate to the point where we've utterly forgotten what our core values are.

George Clooney is the title character, a worn-down "fixer" for a New York corporate law firm. It's a remarkable performance. Against all odds, Clooney finds a way to deaden the easy charm he naturally effuses, looking downright haggard and detached as Clayton helps wealthy clients worm their way out of legal and personal crises (we first meet him being summoned to a rich guy's house to cover up a hit-and-run accident). Clayton is miserable, and as he mopes along with a perpetual sigh, he sees himself as destined to hoe this particular row for the rest of his life.

That all changes when he finds himself face to face with a colleague whose profound guilt over the lifetime of professional wrongs he's committed has driven him off the deep end. Tom Wilkinson plays the tortured attorney, Arthur Edens, and though it's a supporting role, his is the pivotal performance in the film. Wilkinson attacks the part with an ingenious balance of focused intensity and wild abandon: Arthur is clearly off his rocker, yet at the heart of his meltdown is the sobering realization that he has devoted his career, his talents, his very soul to propping up the world's bad guys. Wilkinson, one of our great actors at the top of his game, is a wonder to watch—and incidentally the hands-down winner of this year's Movies for Grownups® Best Supporting Actor Award.

Michael Clayton bristles with marvelously edgy performances—Tilda Swinton is breathtaking as the corporate lawyer who, having crashed through the glass ceiling, lives in constant terror that the powerful men around her will see her picking the shards from her skin. And Sydney Pollack, a fine director whose own films often explore the soullessness of corporate America (The Firm, Tootsie), is great fun as Clayton's boss.

Audiences didn't exactly flock to Michael Clayton its first time around—the off-putting title may have had something to do with that. Not only does this film deserve its own audience, but a strong box office sendoff might encourage studios to make more smart, bracing thrillers like this.

January 2008

The Weinstein Company

Cassandra's Dream (PG-13)

Remember when people used to yearn for the old “funny” Woody Allen? I don’t hear that much anymore, and Cassandra’s Dream, the latest in Allen’s Britain-based psychological thrillers, is probably part of the reason. The older he gets, and the darker his vision becomes, the more he excels at this sort of small-scale caper, scrounging around at the muddy bottom of human nature. I remain one of the dozen or so folks who still admit to laughing out loud at new Woody Allen comedies, but when he puts on his black hat, man, you’d better bring a klieg light to see through the gloom.

This time Allen gives us two brothers (Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell), both of whom are having financial problems. They go to their rich uncle (Tom Wilkinson) for help and he agrees to bankroll them, with one condition: they have to kill a troublesome business associate. As with Allen’s previous London-based thriller, Match Point, most of the guilty fun for us comes in the lead-up to the crime. Allen has mastered the art of methodically ratcheting up the tension, each scene amounting to a step-by-step tutorial on how to commit murder: getting the gun, stealing the locksmith’s tools, staking out the victim’s house. By the time the trigger gets pulled—and Allen characteristically turns his camera away at the very last instant—we are virtually implicated in the crime ourselves, and as the scheme inevitably begins to unravel in the final act, we share in the killers’ sense of the world closing in on them.

Cassandra’s Dream—named for a sailboat that figures in the plot—could use a good 15-minute trim; Allen lets the scenes depicting Farrell’s descent into doubt and self-loathing go on a bit long. But once again, the director proves himself to be a master at drawing breathtaking performances from his cast. As usual, Wilkinson (winner of this year’s Movies for Grownups® Best Supporting Actor Award for his role in Michael Clayton) astonishes. As benevolent, self-assured Uncle Howard, he descends in a single shot to a venal, murderous schemer. It’s a shocking metamorphosis—reason enough to spend a couple of hours aboard Cassandra’s Dream.

Warner Bros.

The Bucket List (PG-13)

There’s a nugget of conventional baseball wisdom that says no matter how stellar a player’s performance is on the field, unless his team is a winner, he’ll never be named the league MVP. I thought about that while watching The Bucket List, the new sort-of comedy that features two all-star performances by Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson.

Think of Freeman as a supercool pitcher, towering on the mound, spinning curveballs that loop-de-loop to the plate and bamboozle one batter after another. And there’s Nicholson, the hotshot shortstop, spearing frozen rope liners and turning unassisted double plays. Meanwhile, it appears the rest of the team, and the manager and the coaches, have never gotten off the team bus.

The film’s concept is a good one: Two guys, newly diagnosed with terminal illnesses, meet up in a hospital and decide to create a “bucket list,” a catalog of things they want to do before they kick the bucket. Next, it’s off to see the world and tick off the list: skydive, see the pyramids, drive a racecar, go on safari, etc. It has all the elements of a slam-bang road picture worthy of Bing and Bob. You need only make sure of one thing: get those guys out of that hospital room as soon as possible. Yet astonishingly, director Rob Reiner and writer Justin Zackham keep the guys on an IV drip a full 39 minutes into the film. And when the two finally do head off for their end-of-a-lifetime trip, the whirlwind of adventures comes in a rapid, haphazard progression that screams for some sort of dramatic structure, but in practice resembles one of Lowell Thomas’s old Cinerama travelogues.

What’s more, for an accomplished director, Reiner can be awfully sloppy. Much is made of a scene in which Nicholson’s head is shaved for surgery, yet before he leaves the hospital in a week or so, not only has it grown back, it’s even flying off to the side in the star’s trademark wild-man-with-bed-head look.

So the truth is, The Bucket List shouldn’t be very good at all. Still, the headliners wring every molecule of stardust from their performances. As always, Freeman adds his unique blend of charm and dignity to the proceedings, but he’s also a whole lot funnier here than he ordinarily allows, seemingly liberated by his proximity to his anything-goes co-star. And Nicholson, while providing ample doses of his smirky bad-boy persona, proves to be touchingly vulnerable, particularly in the early going, curled up in his hospital bed, utterly alone with the news that he has barely a year to live. Together, they seem to be having the time of their lives, using sheer force of will to infuse the sometimes creaky dialogue with shades of meaning I’m guessing the writer never even imagined.

The lessons The Bucket List has to teach us are unremarkable, yet always worth revisiting: money can’t buy happiness (or long life), holding a grudge hurts you more than the person you’re grudging against, your dreams are worth following, and Jack Nicholson still looks awesome in shades. I can live with that.

December 2007

Paramount Classics

The Kite Runner (PG-13)

An awful lot of "epic" historical dramas seem content to take a few characters who could fit into virtually any era from the Renaissance to Reconstruction, plop them down into a picturesque period, and let 'er rip. On the other hand, great epic films—we're talking the likes of Doctor Zhivago and Gone With the Wind—weave a seamless fabric of character and place, creating a sense of inevitability when it comes to what's happening to whom and when. The Kite Runner, a sweeping story of boyhood friendships, geopolitical upheaval, and personal redemption, takes its place among those great epics as a compelling, often devastating story driven not only by the small-scale dramas it depicts, but also by the cultural and political turbulence surrounding them.

Amir and Hassan are two boys growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan, in the 1970s. They are of different social classes but united in their love of kite fighting—a peculiar sport in which competitors try to entangle and cut down each other's kites. The film's early kite fight sequences, visually enthralling in their color and swooping action, stand in stark contrast to later visions of Kabul under the domination of first the Soviets and then the Taliban, where even the trees are sheared away to create a stark, lifeless landscape. Director Marc Foster (who helmed the deeply disturbing Monster's Ball and the playfully twisted Stranger than Fiction) doesn't spare our sensibilities as we witness the repeated rape of Afghanistan. But he's also a wonderfully humane storyteller; the brutal assault on one of the young boys, the pivotal event of the movie, is seen primarily in the panicked eyes of his best friend, watching terrified from around a corner. The attack's aftermath pushes the boys apart, and before long Amir and his father (an intellectual, a commodity valued by neither the Soviets nor the Taliban) must escape from Kabul. We find them, years later, living amongst fellow refugees in San Francisco where Amir, played as an adult by the quietly evocative Khalid Abdalla, never forgets his friend…nor forgives himself for the unspeakable injustice he helped perpetrate against him.

Determined to make things right, he returns to Taliban-controlled Kabul, witnessing one atrocity after another. And while Amir's settling of accounts with his old friend doesn't turn out precisely as he expected, he does make amends—after some heartbreaking side trips and a rousing chase across a bleakly beautiful landscape (with western China standing in for war-torn Afghanistan).

If you go to see The Kite Runner, be sure to bring your reading glasses. More than three-quarters of the film is spoken in Afghan dialects. But you don't need to speak the language to appreciate the compelling performances—particularly that of Homayoun Ershadi as Amir's father. Born in Iran in 1947, Ershadi was an architect before he turned to acting—and here his character provides the moral center of the movie, instilling in his son the values of integrity that drive Amir for the rest of the movie, leading him back into the jaws of death in Afghanistan. It's an inspiring performance, and one of the main reasons The Kite Runner flies as high as it does.

Focus Features

Atonement (R)

About an hour into Atonement, a visually stunning, if emotionally flat, World War II-era story of adolescent lies and grownup passions, director Joe Wright takes us on a breathtakingly complex, single-shot tour of the beach at Dunkirk. For a full five minutes we wander with a young British soldier (James McAvoy) among tens of thousands of comrades in arms, a roiling mass of humanity awaiting either rescue by sea or annihilation by the Nazis. It's a surreal vision: cavalry horses and motor vehicles alike are being destroyed to prevent their appropriation by the enemy; drunken soldiers are biding their time on the seaside resort's Ferris wheel and kiddie rides; a choir of military men stands at attention on a gazebo, singing a hymn.

It's an indelible scene, one that haunts the viewer hours after leaving the theater, and perhaps it's unfair to expect the story, a sob-seeking tale of lovers separated by a false accusation, to measure up. And the truth is, Wright's visionary filmmaking style—with its exquisitely staged tableaus of floating bodies, stately manors, and impossibly beautiful actors—can't entirely sustain what is, in the end, a narrative that masquerades as an epic love story but would work equally well as a one-act play.

McAvoy plays the son of a housekeeper to one of those to-the-manor-born families that, from the moment they glide onscreen—with the men's ramrod posture, the women's pale skin and silky gowns, and everyone's shrouded allusions to Britain's class system—fairly scream Masterpiece Theatre. The housekeeper's son has not only managed to better himself by getting a university education; he has also wormed his way into the heart of the family's stunningly beautiful daughter (Keira Knightley). But there's also a younger sister (Saoirse Ronan) who, jealous or confused or just plain nuts (we're never really quite sure), manufactures a false accusation that, in the course of a single change of scene, blows everybody's happiness to smithereens.

It's all based on a successful novel by Ian McEwan, and I imagine it's all easier to swallow on the printed page. But it's also difficult to imagine the book conjuring mental pictures to rival the astonishing feast for the eyes provided by Joe Wright and his cinematographer, Seamus McGarvey. Let's hope their future projects will explore subjects and characters as compelling as their artistic ambitions.

Fox Searchlight

The Savages (R)

"We are horrible, horrible people," cries Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) in the parking lot of her father's new nursing home. "Horrible, horrible, horrible people." But in this deft, dark comedy, committing her father, a dementia patient, to fairly congenial care isn't the worst of it. What's really horrible is that her partner in this decision, her older brother, Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), cannot comfort her. Instead, he stands stiffly beside her in the frigid air, his eventual attempt at a hug rebuffed.

Both siblings in The Savages are achingly awkward, though in different ways. Wendy temps and writes unproduced plays; Jon is a theater professor perpetually at work on a Bertolt Brecht bio. Neither has a family. Their psychological growth, it seems, was stunted by their depressive mother and abusive father. But the siblings are jarred from their mildly dysfunctional, self-centered lives to care for their estranged father, played by Broadway legend Philip Bosco, perhaps best known to TV audiences as a judge on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Though they're both around 40, Jon and Wendy's childhood rivalry is always gnawing at the edges of their conversations. And these characters are played by two of the best film actors working today: Hoffman has one Oscar already and Linney has two nominations. Their performances ring so true that, as the story unfolds, you almost begin to worry what will become of their characters after the film is over.

The father's fate, on the other hand, is not in doubt. With spitting-mad outbursts and the occasional sad smile, Bosco touchingly embodies the slow acceptance of his diminished powers—though he doesn't recognize, as one might hope he would, the damage his earlier actions have done to his children. Still, the grudging affection the siblings show each other as they struggle with their shared burden seems to afford their father a measure of forgiveness. And in the process, the brother and sister take baby steps towards becoming more compassionate and connected people than their deeply flawed parents could have shown them how to be.
(Review by Margaret Guroff)

November 2007

United Artists

Lions for Lambs (R)

So many things are so very wrong with Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs that it's tempting to simply say it's the worst-executed piece of big-screen propaganda since movie producer/God incarnate Sun Myung Moon got Laurence Olivier to play Douglas MacArthur in his anti-Commie epic Inchon, and to leave it at that.

But I sat through an hour and a half of this thing and, doggone it, somebody’s gonna pay. In the past year we’ve already seen some pretty good movies that touch on America’s Middle East policies—especially In the Valley of Elah and The Kingdom. While standing fast to their principles, films like these draw upon universally shared human experiences. Whether you agree with the filmmaker’s take or not, you at least come away having had a unique glimpse into the human condition, something all good films should provide.

You’d expect to get something like that here from director-star Redford, whose deftly humane touch nurtures just about everything he creates (Ordinary People, The Horse Whisperer, A River Runs Through It). But this time Redford—determined to convince us all that America’s involvement in Iraq and environs has been disastrous—simply sits us down and yells at us (and by the way, how many dozen people out there still believe for one moment it’s been going swimmingly over there?).

First we meet Ace Reporter Meryl Streep, staring down Smug Republican Senator Tom Cruise. He’s summoned her to his office to tell her about America’s new, can’t-miss military initiative in Afghanistan, which seems to involve putting a couple of GIs on the peaks of every tall mountain in the country. Next we meet two of those lucky soldiers, who have names in the movie, but I’ve forgotten them because they’re not really characters, they’re just actors in uniforms flailing around in a rocky, snowy landscape every bit as convincing as the set of the musical version of Lost Horizon. And finally we are introduced to Professor Robert Redford, who teaches some kind of course at a school identified in a subtitle as "A California University." He has some tangential connection to the two soldiers—they were students who, upon enrolling in his class, promptly dropped out to join the Army (not the most glowing endorsement a militantly anti-military teacher could get).

So, what we get in Lions for Lambs is a lot of people sitting around talking to each other. Cruise gets seriously into Streep’s face, mouthing Bush-like bromides (and seriously, in what universe are we to be expected to buy Tom Cruise as a neocon?). Uptight and anxiously scribbling in her notepad (although always on the same page, on the same top line, it appears) Streep gives by far the best performance in the film. Which is a lot like saying the Monkey Boy is the most compelling biped in the sideshow. Redford sits in his cramped academic’s office, browbeating a politically disengaged student (newcomer Andrew Garfield, whose eye-rolling and heavy sighing reflect the audience reaction to the whole endeavor). And later Streep heads back to her cable news channel offices, where she engages in yet another heated closed-door conversation with her editor (Kevin Dunn), who flatly refuses her demand to cast the new military strategy as a rerun of Vietnam. He’s hung up on reporting—get this—just the facts.

The net result is one of the most claustrophobic movies in memory. We’re initially relieved to see the soldiers (Michael Peña and Derek Luke) jump out of a helicopter onto an Afghan mountain. At last, we tell ourselves, we’re going to see some action. So what do Redford and screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan do with these guys? One suffers a compound leg fracture; the other becomes hopelessly stuck in the snow. So they’re left to, you guessed it, talk to each other for the rest of the movie!

Clearly, someone is proud to be breaking all the rules of good narrative moviemaking here, certain that the sheer power of ideas will catapult Lions for Lambs into the public consciousness. But rules exist for a reason. If you want to see narrative propaganda at its absolute best, go no further than the newly restored version of Sergei Eisenstein’s silent Soviet film classic The Battleship Potemkin. In 80 years, the political immediacy of Eisenstein’s call for a revolution of the proletariat has long since evaporated. But what remains is a breathtaking exercise in filmmaking; the famous Odessa Steps massacre sequence is ripped off shamelessly by directors to this day.

Like the Soviet brand of Communism exalted by Eisenstein in Potemkin, 80 years from now the controversy over U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan will most likely be a footnote to history. But it’s unlikely that film students of the day will be dissecting Lions for Lambs, except perhaps as a model of how to utterly waste 90 minutes—not to mention three of the biggest stars in the known universe.

Sony Pictures Classics

Sleuth (R)

With Michael Caine and Jude Law as the stars and Kenneth Branagh as the director—multiple Oscar nominees all—plus Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter as the writer, well, it should have been easy to make Sleuth a pretty good movie. And apparently it was. Too bad no one seemed inspired to make it a great one.

Not that they didn't try. Branagh labors, too self-consciously, to bring visual sizzle to what is essentially a one-set, two-actor play. Pinter adds a third-act twist that renders playwright Anthony Shaffer's original, ingenious plot resolution into an ambiguous mess. So we're left with only the stars, acting their hearts out and sidestepping the plot holes and self-indulgent camera work with glorious panache.

Caine (and is there on earth a more reliably pleasing screen presence?) stars as an aging crime novelist who meets with his romantic rival, played by the ever-charming Law, in order to have it out with the upstart. Of course, Caine costarred in the original screen version of Sleuth back in 1972, and back then played the young Lothario, opposite the great Laurence Olivier. Caine's is a shrewd re-imagining of the role: Olivier played the part as a spoiled aristocrat, perhaps in a bit over his head as he tries to exact all-too-clever revenge on the man who has stolen his wife. Caine, on the other hand, slowly reveals the long-buried temperament of a street tough. To cross him, the younger man soon begins to realize, can be one of life's great mistakes.

As for Law, just as his character is prepared to counter his adversary's every move, so the actor stands admirably toe-to-toe with Caine. Their encounters—thanks in large part to Pinter's new dialogue, which is his one truly great contribution to the film—crackle with an energy that in the best scenes dials up to megawatt levels. And director Branagh has his moments, too—particularly in his willingness to let the camera linger on his actors, long after most directors would cut away. One scene, involving a gunshot, is followed by an excruciatingly held frame of the shooter standing there, hand outstretched, just staring at the victim. Branagh gives us the longest time to study that face and try to read it. It's a wonderful piece of filmmaking in a film that has enough wonderful pieces to keep you hoping for more…and disappointed to discover there aren't nearly enough of them.

A word must be added about Alec Cawthorne, the actor who appears as the understated Inspector Doppler. I first saw him in this very same role, on the London stage, some 35 years ago, and he has made something of a career of playing it ever since. He remains as curmudgeonly and surprising as ever.

October 2007

Miramax

No Country for Old Men (R)

The sun-bleached landscapes and stunning sunsets of the American West make a heartbreakingly beautiful backdrop for the black-hearted mayhem that punctuates No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers' latest foray into the dark recesses of human nature.

In many ways, it's the writing-directing team's most profoundly disturbing vision, and that includes that leg in the woodchipper in Fargo. While the brothers in the past have been satisfied to let the occasional outrageously violent outburst add power to their films, this time they've utterly reversed the formula: the body-count meter starts ticking from the first frames, relieved only by the occasional, sweetly observed moment of human tenderness.

Following a brutal opening sequence, we meet a hunter (Josh Brolin, looking and sounding more like his dad James every year) who stumbles upon the site of a desert drug deal gone wrong. Real wrong. Dead men lie everywhere, each clutching the automatic weapon he went down firing. There's a ton or so of heroin and $2 million in cash. He takes the cash, and soon he's being relentlessly tracked down by a killer (Javier Bardem) who's as cold-blooded as a desert rattler.

As the killer, Bardem is a dead-eyed bundle of pure evil. A brooding devil in a pageboy haircut, he's chillingly likely to turn even the most casual encounter with a stranger into a spectacle of gushing blood. By film's end, when we find ourselves holding our breath whenever Bardem encounters anyone, even the Coens seem ready to shield their eyes—his last several killings happen out of sight and even out of earshot.

Also part of the chase, but barely so, is Tommy Lee Jones as a West Texas sheriff. Sad-eyed and melancholy, with that fatigued, sigh-inducing manner Jones excels in, the sheriff is overwhelmed by the mounting violence he sees, not only in his blood-soaked town, but in the world at large. He's about to retire, but the world he's escaping to, he fears, is no better than the one he's leaving behind. Evil is everywhere, he complains to his deputies, to his friends, and to his wife. And as the film's villain tracks his prey across the Southwestern desert, dark and dangerous as an approaching thunderstorm, it's hard to argue with him.

Fox Searchlight

The Darjeeling Limited (R)

In The Darjeeling Limited, three brothers who have not seen each other since their father's funeral a year earlier find themselves together on a crowded train heading for the foothills of India's Himalaya mountains. Despite their obvious affection for one another, in their cramped compartment they often lash out at each other, like scorpions in a shoebox—no suprise for Wes Anderson fans, as his films (The Royal Tenenbaums and Rushmore) have always explored the gnarly root systems that tangle beneath family trees.

At first we believe the three are on a spiritual journey, but we soon discover the trip has a lot more to do with their missing mother (Anjelica Huston), who never did manage to make it to her hubby's funeral. As the train makes slow progress across the subcontinent, the brothers re-establish their childhood pecking order: Owen Wilson is the oldest, and he still orders his brothers' restaurant meals for them. He's also bandaged like a mummy, after having crashed his motorcycle into a hillside. Second is the marvelous Adrien Brody (The Pianist), whose lanky, deliberate character suggests a thoughtful praying mantis. And youngest is Jason Schwartzman, who will forever be remembered as the sensational Max Fischer in Rushmore. (There's also a delightful, nearly wordless visit from Bill Murray, who is something of a good luck charm for the director's best films.)

Anderson's characters are always colorful, but in India he's finally found a setting to give them some competition. The towns and villages flash by, a blur of blossoming flowers and vividly painted houses. The train itself is a Crayola box of colors, and the temples visited by the brothers fairly explode with blues, reds, and yellows.

And like the titular train, which at one point finds itself lost on a wayward set of tracks, The Darjeeling Limited never really seems to be going anywhere. We're happy to spend time with these engaging characters, but since most of the brothers' most pressing interpersonal problems involve people who aren't there (a pregnant wife, an angry ex-girlfriend, that missing mom), it's kind of hard to invest in them. Really, the film only comes to startling life when the guys, stranded in a village, suddenly find themselves thrust into a local tragedy.

Anderson does offer a resolution of sorts in the final reel. But even for his devotees, there's this nagging sense that the film could have ended at any random point. And that leads to the inevitable question: Was this trip necessary?

Paramount Vantage

Into the Wild (R)

Some wonderful supporting performances—including a truly memorable turn by Hal Holbrook—don't quite save Into the Wild from being an overlong, rambling account of a young man's willy-nilly wanderings into self-destruction. But there are moments of beauty, both scenic and human in nature, that make it at times seem like a better picture than it really is.

A film version of Jon Krakauer's book, the movie chronicles the true story of Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch), a young Emory grad who left his privileged surroundings in 1992 to hit the road and become what was called in more romantic times a hobo. He hops freight trains and hitchhikes his way around the country, at some point focusing his ambition on heading to Alaska and getting as far away from civilization as he possibly can.

Writer-director Sean Penn expects us to buy into Chris's personal voyage, but the character remains too much of an enigma for us to really care too much about him. He's a complex guy, all right, but we never quite figure out, as the hippies he encounters on the road would say, "where his head is at." At times he seems a charming travel companion, easily making friends and working odd jobs. At others he's moody and self-absorbed. He patiently listens to advice from the many people he meets, but there's scant evidence he ever absorbs a word of it. On one hand, he seems to have a uniquely lucid view of his place in the universe; on the other, he writes rambling missives that could be straight from the nubby pencil of the Unabomber.

The contradictions would be fine if there were some connective tissue between them, but the script just keeps careening from one to another. As Chris, Hirsch isn't much help. He's handsome and has a wonderfully open face, with a Candide-like quality of naiveté. But he's all sponge, and never wrings himself out to help us see what odd mix is fermenting inside his character. (I will say, though, that Hirsch is absolutely, positively the perfect choice for his next film, a live-action version of the anime cartoon classic Speed Racer.)

A half-hearted stab is made at explaining Chris's mental state: he grew up watching his wealthy parents beat up on each other, physically and emotionally. That seems to be his motivation for rejecting all materialistic trappings, which he sees as the misplaced focus of their miserable existence. William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden are the tortured parents, and theirs are the first outstanding performances that keep us from starting our own odyssey for the exits. Hurt's voyage from cold-fish pop to passionately anguished father, told in remarkable actor's shorthand, is riveting. And Harden, with the more difficult role of the mother who emerges from her self-obsessed bubble only when her son disappears, is a marvel of restrained, perpetual panic.

The welcome cameos continue throughout Chris's odyssey. Vince Vaughn, almost unrecognizable as he sheds his wiseguy comic persona, is slyly charming as a Midwestern farmer who teaches Chris how to hold down a job. As the burned-out hippie couple who pick him up along a roadside (is 1992 a bit late for people to refer to themselves as hippies?), the wonderful Catherine Keener (Oscar-nominated for Capote) and a surprising middle-age newcomer named Brian Dierker warmly become the parents Chris wishes he'd had.

But best of all—and the prime reason to stay put for the movie's nearly two-and-a-half-hour run—is Hal Holbrook as an old leather worker that Chris meets in his travels. Holbrook, one of our great actors, has in past years found himself cast in diminished TV roles, or as grumpy authority figures in movies. Here, he blossoms with one of his finest screen performances ever, breathtakingly understated as a man who lost his wife and son to a car accident years ago, and who sees in Chris a chance to finally make an impact on a young man's life. I dare you to watch Holbrook, in his final farewell to the Alaska-bound Chris, and not, like him, find a salty tear running down your cheek.

September 2007

NASA

In the Shadow of the Moon (PG)

There is a moment in the new documentary In the Shadow of the Moon when Neil Armstrong, piloting the Apollo 11 landing module, reports to Mission Control in Houston: "Program alarm....It's a twelve-oh-two."

To the billions of earthlings hunched over radios or glued to their TV sets that unforgettable summer day, Armstrong's comment passed almost unnoticed. But using rarely seen footage of the Houston controllers, perfectly synced with a recording of the 1969 radio transmission, director David Sington makes its implications startlingly clear. At Armstrong's "twelve-oh-two" announcement, astronaut Charlie Duke, the CapCom (capsule communicator) officer in Houston, suddenly drops his head in near-despair. His open, boyish face reveals the dreadful truth: with the landing module poised above the lunar surface, the first manned moon landing was, very possibly, about to be scrubbed.

As it turns out, the alarm is for a simple computer overload, and the problem is almost instantaneously fixed. But the episode reveals the thread of ever-impending danger that ran through America's 1960s space race—and the astonishing chain of ambition, courage, resourcefulness, and dumb luck that led to Armstrong's One Small Step on July 20, 1969.

We've seen lots of moon landing documentaries in 40 years, and some really good movies based on America's leap into space (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, Space Cowboys). But Sington—a Brit, of all people—has put together the single most compelling Apollo film document yet. He does it by mining NASA's film archives to find pristine footage (including images from space that would be the envy of any Hollywood special effects wizard), and by getting 10 astronauts from the Apollo program to sit down and tell their stories to the camera. Spectacular as the launch and landing footage is, it's those unforgettable talking heads who give the film its ultimate power. Their faces lined with experience, their eyes somehow smoldering with memories of sights never seen before—nor seen since—they speak with the solemnity and humility of those who have emerged from some mystical experience. Nearly 40 years on, they still struggle at times to convey the awful emptiness and startling beauty of space, and one is reminded of what the space traveler said in Carl Sagan's novel Contact: they should have sent a poet.

Lionsgate

3:10 to Yuma (R)

The best movie western since Silverado, 3:10 to Yuma borrows wonderfully from John Ford's epic classics like Stagecoach and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon—and from the great character-driven horse operas like Shane, High Noon, and The Searchers. That's pretty rarified company, and western movies aren't the crowd-pleasers that they used to be, but if this film had unspooled 50 years ago, we'd still be talking about it as one of the greats.

Director James Mangold (Walk the Line; Cop Land; Girl, Interrupted) has done much more than remake a vintage 1957 Glenn Ford vehicle. He's taken the best elements of the quintessentially American film genre and woven them into a complex fabric of showdowns and sweetness, of dust-choked main streets and achingly beautiful New Mexico vistas. And it all powers ahead, unrelentingly, with the pounding urgency of a posse's hoofbeats.

Russell Crowe, in his most satisfying role in years, stars as Ben Wade, a stagecoach bandit who has finally been caught by his longtime nemesis, a bounty hunter (Peter Fonda, who, following up his recent flicks Wild Hogs and Ghost Rider, is having a great year in delightful supporting roles). They're an intriguing pair, these two: despite their venomous contempt for each other, there's a hint that they were at one time both on the same (wrong) side of the law. And they're both capable of exhibiting disarming charm and sophistication—punctuated by explosions of unspeakable violence. Standing between them is Christian Bale, playing a rancher who agrees to help transport Wade to the train that will take him to trial in Yuma. He's the classic western-movie Noble Man, whose only motivations are provision for his family and the bond of his word. And like most Noble Men, in the final reel he finds himself face to face with the ultimate challenge to his treasured integrity.

Even an exquisite film like 3:10 to Yuma won't resurrect the "oater" as a dominant genre; I haven't seen a city kid in a cowboy hat since Bonanza went off the air. But it's gratifying to know that, in the hands of the truly gifted, a western can still pack the wallop of a well-oiled Smith & Wesson.

August 2007

Universal Pictures

Mr. Bean's Holiday (G)

For a demonstration of the pure and wonderfully subjective nature of comedy, I give you Mr. Bean's Holiday, the second feature film starring Rowan Atkinson as the spindly, nearly silent, congenitally childish and self-centered character he introduced long ago on the British telly.

After an hour and a half of onscreen Beanisms, the film's credits end with a brief humorous clip, shot on a beach.

"Ooooh!" sneered a fellow critic as he fairly stormed from the theater. "Isn't he soooooo clever!" Then, he virtually spit: "Where's a tsunami when you need one?"

It wasn't just that this guy found the movie unfunny—he was positively ticked off by it. The rest of us who'd stayed through the credits swiveled our heads briefly in his direction, barely making out his retreating figure, because our eyes were unfocused from tears, our cheeks damp with the overflow. We might have shed them laughing; we might have wept for sheer ecstasy, because I want to tell you here and now that Mr. Bean's Holiday—as a pure comedy devoid of meanness, biting satire, ironic commentary, or even shrewd cultural reflections—is to this viewer among the funniest films ever made.

There is a plot, however slight: Bean wins a trip from rainy England to sunny Cannes, and he must get there by train. Any number of diversions nearly keep him from getting to the beach, and they all exist simply to present Bean with an obstacle to which he concocts an utterly inappropriate, yet somehow successful, solution.

Like the greatest screen comics—and I'm thinking the likes of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Jacques Tati here—Bean is funny on his own terms, in a slightly parallel universe that looks an awful lot like ours, yet is forever being bent to conform to his oddball dimension. It's not a universe that's necessarily friendly to Bean—his bicycle gets run over by a tank that rumbles out of nowhere; doors have a nasty habit of swinging shut and locking him out (or in)—but it's his world, no doubt about it. His misadventures inevitably lead to new opportunities to succeed, which likewise turn disastrous, until finally, almost inexplicably, everything turns out just fine.

That's why I call Bean a pure comedy: Virtually every laugh in the film is organic, growing solely from the set-up situation that precedes it. Bean doesn't ask us to bring any cultural prejudices. Political axes are to be left at the door. Sure, Bean the character is venal and selfish in a childish kind of way, but we're not to read into his peccadilloes any commentary on the human condition. When Bean, finding himself penniless in a French village, turns street performer by miming a recording of Puccini's O Mio Babbino Caro—an aria for soprano—he doesn't clown it up. As Bean, Atkinson commits himself utterly and completely to the piece, selling his performance with all the fierceness of Montserrat Caballé. Likewise, in an inspired finale, Bean takes a hazard-strewn walk to the beach that conjures up memories of the great visual comic Tati (whose classic Mr. Hulot's Holiday has to have been the inspiration for this film)—plus images of the baby Swee' Pea, in those old Popeye cartoons, who almost magically survives a romp at a construction site despite swinging beams, falling bricks, and runaway wheelbarrows.

I empathize with that poor critic who couldn't stand another second of Bean. As with all humor, you either get it or you don't. The fact that the film is rated G—not even PG!—can be an automatic turnoff for anyone who insists that their comedy be dangerous. But in many ways, as he invites us to visit his own off-kilter dimension, Atkinson as Mr. Bean is working a thousand feet up without a net. And that's as dangerous as it gets.

Twentieth Century Fox

The Simpsons Movie (PG-13)

For those of us who despaired of ever seeing Homer Simpson lumber across a big screen, or hearing Bart let loose with that devil-boy cackle in big-theater surround sound, the glorious day of deliverance has finally come. And the best news of all: Even though after 20 years on the air The Simpsons has left its glory days far behind, the multiplex incar