A serviceable if straightforwardly plotted historical thriller, director Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise as a German officer who joins a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, will play decently with those who have helped make speculative and non-fiction World War II tales a viable small screen cottage industry. Rooted in actual events, the film more or less compensates for a lack of verve and action with solid production design and crisp, respectable performances from its ensemble cast, which includes Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy and Terrence Stamp.

Set mostly in July, 1944, the story focuses on Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise), a German officer who has become appalled by Hitler’s atrocities and the outrages committed by his Nazi SS. Joining up with a band of resistance plotters consisting of both senior officers and other statesmen-in-waiting, von Stauffenberg helps refine a plan to kill Hitler with explosives, and use the momentary period of resulting confusion to take over Berlin, and thus the government. The conspirators arm themselves with Hitler’s own code-named emergency plan to stabilize the nation in the event of his attack or demise, hoping to quickly mobilize the reserve army and turn them against the brutal SS elite.

Apart from an opening air attack sequence, Valkyrie is fundamentally a film about back-room plotting, not big-stroke action. There are a few striking visual markers — uncradled phones and slamming typewriter keys — that hint at kinetic, building tension, but Singer also misses key opportunities to inject a little energy and visual flash into the story, as exemplified by a clumsily staged arrest sequence late in the film. Valkyrie at times feels emotionally constrained, too invested in knit-brow speechifying.

That said, there’s a polished, professional sheen to the film. Greys dominate cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel’s palette, highlighting the despair the conspirators feel. John Ottman’s score pushes all the right buttons, and since he’s also the movie’s editor the match of image and music seems to especially work well in concert. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (MGM, PG-13, 120 minutes)

The directorial debut of longtime character actor Brian Goodman, What Doesn’t Kill You slots in as this December’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, which is to say a Northeastern-set tale of marginalized fringe-dwellers forced, by desperate circumstances, into making One Last Bad Decision.

It’s not a knock at all to say that the Lumet-ian crime drama is a sort of flip-side companion piece to movies like We Own the Night and Pride and Glory — the big similarity being the intersection and messy entanglements of family and illicit activities, and the key difference being the lack of any concrete, behind-the-badge perspective. Well acted and solidly put together, What Doesn’t Kill You may not win prizes for narrative trailblazing, but fans of both similar films and the actors involved here will no doubt take to its distressed genuineness.

At the center of the movie are two knockabout guys, Brian (Mark Ruffalo, above) and Paulie (Ethan Hawke), longtime friends who grew up as close as brothers on the gritty streets of south Boston. Living by the code of their dog-eat-dog neighborhood, their petty crimes and misdemeanors eventually bring them under the wing of local crime boss Pat Kelly (multi-hyphenate Goodman). After 15 years of errands and percentile cuts, though, they’re looking for bigger stakes. When Pat gets shipped off to prison on an old homicide rap, the pair make their move, carving out their own niche by muscling in on the business of a coke dealer friend. As Brian becomes increasingly lost in a haze of drugs, even the love he has for his wife (Amanda Peet) and two children doesn’t seem like it will be enough to redeem him.

Soon Brian and Paulie land in prison too. Brian gets out first, and tries to put his life back on track with the assistance of a neighborhood mentor who urges him to consider AA meetings. But when Paulie gets out and unveils bold plans for (the obligatory) one last heist, will underemployed Brian find the allure of old fraternal bonds and the potential of quick, easy money too much to resist?

The film’s press notes assert that it’s based on events from Goodman’s life, which may be what lends the screenplay — co-written with Paul Murray and Donnie Wahlberg, who has a small role as a cop who shadows and harasses the guys — an air of unfussy authenticity, if not necessarily deep originality. Certainly Hawke and Ruffalo have a nice rapport, and the latter seems invigorated by the chance to play something a bit meatier, angrier and more assertive. Excepting a largely procedural part in David Fincher’s Zodiac, this is Ruffalo’s best screen performance in easily four or five years.

Some of the smartest, most interesting parts of What Doesn’t Kill You, though, lie in its small, anchoring grace notes. Goodman’s selection of composer Alex Wurman proves a wise one, as the delicate, melancholic piano-and-strings theme helps underscore a forlorn, parallel socioeconomic struggle innate to the narrative, and lend the movie’s underclass struggle a certain sympathetic identification. Watching and ruminating upon What Doesn’t Kill You, it’s easy to understand the Christian maxim, “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” (Yari Film Group, R, 100 minutes)

A celluloid mirror is held up to many December family gatherings in the form of Nothing Like the Holidays,
a lively, quite well cast dramedy that captures both the grey-cloud
exasperation and silver lining of time spent cooped up with blood
relatives who remain outside of driving distance for the rest of the
year. Set amongst a sociable Puerto Rican-American family in Chicago’s
Humboldt Park area, the film leans on a strong ensemble cast to easily
trump its narrative familiarity and pat, sometimes awkward dramatic
hurdles.

The story centers on far-flung members of the Rodriguez family who converge at their parents’
home to celebrate Christmas. There’s wounded
Iraq War veteran Jesse (Freddy Rodriguez, above left), who arrives with rekindled
feelings for an old flame (Melonie Diaz), now a mother. Roxanna (Vanessa Ferlito, above right) is an actress who has been
chasing Hollywood dreams for years, and is
hopeful of good news on a recent audition. Eldest brother Mauricio
(John Leguizamo, above center), meanwhile, struggles to bridge the cultural gap
between his high-powered executive wife (Debra Messing) and the rest of
his family, most particularly his mother Anna (Elizabeth Peña), who
doesn’t hide her dismay that they haven’t yet delivered her a
grandchild. Matters are thrown into disarray when Anna shocks her children by announcing that she’s divorcing their father Edy (Alfred Molina), whom she suspects of
having an affair.

Director Alfredo de Villa (Adrift in Manhattan)
has a writing background as well, which helps him locate the
authenticity in this tale: what’s endearing about a sibling one moment
can also become suddenly irritating. He achieves this primarily though
a lot of jokey, barb-filled crosstalk, but there’s some smart visual
detail too, like the photo of Puerto Rican Hall of Fame baseball player
Roberto Clemente that hangs in the background on the wall of Edy’s
modest bodega.

The script, by Alison Swan and Rick Najara, keeps most conflict at arms’ length, defined only enough to
generate momentary drama that never really seeps out of any single,
self-contained scene. Owing to this, the movie also has trouble
balancing some of the more emotionally charged moments with its
seemingly natural instinct to inject comedy, as in a sequence where
Mauricio attempts to mitigate the conflict between his parents by
inviting over the neighbouhood priest, who’s only too happy to stuff
his face with Chinese carry-out food. Still, the combined effect of all
this voluble engagement is greater than the sum of all its parts,
certainly enough to merit a shrug of good-natured acquiescence. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Overture Films, PG-13, 98 minutes)

A blithely depraved shoot-’em-up in which its glum protagonist cuts a retributive swath across a vast criminal underworld, Punisher: War Zone echoes back to the unthinking low-budget action movies of the 1980s, in which dialogue was only something to fill three to five minutes between set pieces. Steeped in over-the-top brutality and gore-as-comedy, this artless revenge tale has a limited fan base and shelf life.

In 2004, the directorial debut of screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh helped prove the viability of even the bottom shelf of the Marvel Comics canon, when The Punisher, starring Thomas Jane in the vigilante title role and John Travolta as the villain, grossed just under $34 domestically, despite opening within five days of two other hardcore, higher-profile revenge films, Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Man on Fire. Without stars or much of a sense of scope, this iteration’s commercial yield should be lower, though its base-level carnage and mayhem will translate well for international action junkies, and perhaps result in an uptick there. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Lionsgate, R, 103 minutes)

In Nobel Son, Barkley Michaelson (Bryan Greenberg) is struggling to finish his Ph.D. thesis when his father Eli (Alan Rickman), a long-striding, socially artless, egomaniacal bastard, wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. While Eli and his wife Sarah (Mary Steenburgen), a forensics specialist and fellow academician, travel to accept the award, the former’s indiscretions, past and present, complicate matters. After a late-night hook-up with a kooky artist chick (Eliza Dushku), Barkley is kidnapped and ransomed by Thaddeus (Shawn Hatosy), who turns out to have a long-held grudge against Eli. Soon, Barkley becomes complicit in Thaddeus’ scheme, and eventually everyone gets in on the kidnapping, philandering and blackmail. And Pat Benatar is quoted… twice.

The other indie films of director Randall Miller (Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School, Bottle Shock) have, to various degrees, been intriguingly sketched if fitfully misguided character ensembles, up-and-down affairs in which fantastic scenes abut awkward and/or pointless ones. Nobel Son is Miller’s most processed work, most concerned with self-satisfied style over substance, and it’s a misstep in a different direction. The movie wants to be a pulse-quickening genre knuckleball, part Zero Effect, part Lucky Number Slevin, part dysfunctional family dramedy. But the tone isn’t at all a match with the material, no matter the gameness of an intriguing ensemble cast, and imprinted upon every frame, under the electro-throb score from Paul Oakenfold and Mark Adler, is effort, with a capital E. (Unclaimed Freight/Freestyle Releasing, R, 111 minutes)

The self-destructiveness and outlandish behavior of Mickey Rourke — the alcohol and other excesses, the by-mutual-agreement “retirement” from acting in the 1990s (and subsequent decrying of the craft as too feminine), not to mention a boxing career that spanned several years — have all but obliterated the memory of Rourke as a preternaturally charismatic and tender tough-guy actor, when he made his mark in movies like Diner, Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, 9 1/2 Weeks, Angel Heart and Barfly.



America loves redemption stories, though. And so the curtain rises on the unlikely third act of Mickey Rourke by way of The Wrestler, a very conventionally plotted character-study drama that connects chiefly because it’s an ineffable merging of battered, sensitive-bruiser dreamers — its drug-addled, Gorgeous George-type, autumn-of-his-years title character and Rourke, the fragile, musclebound, elective surgery-scarred actor.

Written by Rob Siegel and directed by Darren Aronofsky (in a rather blatant stab at get-out-of-filmmaker-jail relevance after the commercial washout of 2006’s The Fountain), The Wrestler focuses on Randy “The Ram” Robinson, who back in the late ’80s was a headlining professional grappler. Now — two decades later, and his body a tangled mess of bruises and knotty scars — he ekes out a living performing for handfuls of diehard fans in high school gyms around New Jersey. Estranged from his understandably angry and aloof daughter, Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood), and unable to sustain any real relationships, Randy lives for the thrill of the show. A sudden heart attack, however, forces him to consider retirement.

As his sense of identity starts to slip away, Randy begins to evaluate the state of his life — trying to reconnect with his daughter, and strike up a romance with an exotic dancer, Cassidy (Marisa Tomei), who might be ready to start a new life. Yet old habits and easy choices die hard, and Randy’s passion for the ring isn’t something to disappear quietly.

What most comes through in The Wrestler, which won the Golden Lion for Best Picture at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, is Randy’s burning desire for connection and a little human touch, which of course dovetails with Rourke’s own melancholic yearning. The film, therefore, works chiefly as an affecting series of pulled dramatic levers — the awkward reboot of interactions with Stephanie, the fraternal bonds with his fellow wrestlers, the quiet nobility of blue-collar work — even if Aronofsky sometimes overplays the narrative parallelisms, as he does when he pumps in chanting-crowd noise under a long tracking shot that finds Randy reporting to duty during his first day on the job at a grocery store deli counter.

There are great, pulsing moments of matched-medium nostalgia in The Wrestler, as when Randy and Cassidy reminiscence at a bar about ’80s music, or when Randy enters the ring to Guns ‘N’ Roses‘ “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” (Axl Rose may, in fact, be every bit the tragic rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of Rourke.) But the film’s finale overreaches; it doesn’t quite match the tenor of the man we’ve come to see, no matter his emotional drift. Still, Rourke fascinates, though; it’s one of the year’s most mesmerizing, melancholically observant performances, as much because of the long road taken to get there as anything else. (Fox Searchlight, R, 105 minutes)