The Academy Awards on February 22 offer up all sorts of major league intrigue, but the undercard is pretty compelling too, at least for those who’ve seen the 10 short-form (five live action, five animation) Oscar nominees. As a kid I always wondered why these didn’t road-show, and while the truth is they’re too arty to make it worth a distributor’s while in broad fashion, if you live in a big city there’s a decent chance you’ll be able to catch them this month. Otherwise, make yourself a Netflix note.

Director Reto Caffi’s On the Line, a joint Swiss/German entry that runs around half an hour,  is about department store security guard, Rolf (Roeland Wiesnekker) who’s secretly infatuated with Sarah (Catherine Janke), a clerk in the store’s bookshop. When he witnesses who he presumes to be a love rival being attacked on a train, he abandons him — a decision that carries with it devastating consequences. The premise is very Brian De Palma, but the acting here is restrained and beautiful, and the melancholic whole conjures up a slightly sunnier Michael Haneke, maybe cross-pollinated with late ’90s-era James Mangold.

Also fairly long-form, Denmark’s The Pig, scripted by Anders August and Dorte Hogh and directed by the latter, is a sublime treat. When Asbjorn Jensen (Henning Moritzen) is admitted to the hospital for surgery (“in the butt,” as he bluntly tells the nurse), and held over so that some additional tests might be run to determine whether he has cancer, he takes comfort from an unusual source — a whimsical painting of a pig. When it’s removed by the Muslim family of his new roommate — who finds the image offensive — Asbjorn wigs out, demanding its return. His lawyer daughter gets involved, and there’s a wheel-spinning stalemate. It’s a funny concept, rendered in a very rooted, humanistic yet amusing fashion.

French entry Manon on the Asphalt, from writer-directors Elizabeth Marre and Olivier Pont, is a 15-minute tale of subjective remembrance — think of it very loosely as a disciple of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, though vaccumed free of bold-stroke visual style — told from the point-of-view of a girl struck by a car while riding home on her bicycle. Eleven-minute Irish entry New Boy, meanwhile, from writer-director Steph Green, is based on a Roddy Doyle short story. In it, Joseph (Olutunji Ebun-Cole, above), a young African immigrant, struggles to find a place for himself during his first day at a parochial school, as flashbacks make clear a distressing classroom past in his homeland.

The most ploddingly obvious of the bunch, and the only real misfire, is Germany’s 14-minute Toyland, from director Jochen Alexander Freydank. Of course, since it’s about the Holocaust (a mother tries to convince her young son that their Jewish neighbors, and his piano teacher, are going on a journey to “Toyland,” which then complicates things, because of course he wants to go too), it stands as good a chance as anything here — and probably much better — of winning. It’s exquisitely costumed and framed, no doubt, but the “how to save a life” story is a wan Schindler’s List rip-off. I won’t pretend to be a handicapping genius with respect to the “mini” Oscars, but I’d rate The Pig and On the Line tied as top-shelf keepers, New Boy a strong second and respectable tone poem Manon on the Asphalt third of the bunch. If Toyland wins, it’s only because of its thematic focus, and it could signal a big evening for The Reader. For a review of the 2008 Oscar animated short film nominees, meanwhile, click here. (Shorts International/Magnolia, unrated, 94 minutes)

Based on the 2002 children’s book by Neil Gaiman, and adapted and directed by Henry Selick — who also helmed The Nightmare Before Christmas, a movie many people erroneously credit to Tim Burton — Coraline is a multi-dimensional show-stopper, the first stop-motion animated feature conceived and photographed in stereoscopic 3-D. If last summer’s Wall▪E pushed the envelope for kid-pitched big screen fare, underscoring the fact that animation is an evolving medium and not just a genre unto itself, Coraline only further highlights that point: this is a delightfully engaging curio, an idiosyncratic adventure tale about learning to appreciate one’s circumstances.

The story centers on 11-year-old Coraline Jones (voiced by Dakota Fanning), who’s just relocated to rainy Oregon with her parents (voiced by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman), writers who have little time for her. Feisty and curious, she checks in on her much older neighbors — a pair of eccentric washed-up actresses and a Russian trapeze artist — and even endures the chatterbox company of a local boy close to her age, Wybie (voiced by Robert Bailey, Jr.).

Mainly though, Coraline is bored. Stuck indoors, she uncovers a small, secret door wallpapered over (above). Later, venturing through an eerie passageway, she discovers an alternate version of her existence — a parallel reality where everything is similar to her real life, except much better. The adults, including her solicitous, button-eyed “Other Mother” (also voiced by Hatcher), are fun and welcoming, the colors all brighter, and meals come in super-sized portions, with plenty of dessert. Coraline begins to think that this other world might be where she belongs. But when her wondrously off-kilter, fantastical visits turn dangerous and “Other Mother” schemes to keep her there, Coraline musters all of her resourcefulness and determination in an effort to save herself and her family.

The care with which Coraline is rendered offers up all sorts of surface-thrill visual seductions — dust on glass surfaces, or the swirl of fog dissipating underfoot — and reflects more than just the ornately designed backgrounds of many animated films. With its spindly forms and sometimes ironic and macabre touches, there are echoes of The Nightmare Before Christmas, to be sure, as well as narrative parallels to Beetlejuice — a young girl unhappy in her big new home, connected to the spirit world, it turns out.

Mostly, though, Coraline is its own shiny new thing. The down-the-rabbit-hole quality of its story (yes, there’s a talking cat, voiced by Keith David) is a much better natural match for 3-D technology than the yawning conventionality of some previous efforts, like last year’s Fly Me to the Moon. That said, Coraline also never desperately leans on the 3-D for cheap affect; it’s merely a component of its storytelling. The film also benefits from some great vocal performances. A lot of animated movies plug in celebrity voices without much thought or care for overall fit, but Fanning is pitch-perfect as Coraline — you get a sense of the exasperation that fuels her character — and the rest of the cast is a similarly good fit.

While the narrative takes care to root Coraline’s dilemma in a very concrete manner — meaning there’s an actual story to explain the parallel dimension, a loose ghost story template — the film is in essence about awakened imagination, and also the minor-chord adolescent trauma (usually discovered by children a bit younger than Coraline) of discovering that one’s parents have lives outside of your own. Probably no talking cats, though. (Laika/Focus Features, PG, 100 minutes)

Sci-fi action gets a wan workout in Push, an engagingly photographed but dramatically inert Hong Kong-set thriller in which various groups with paranormal abilities do battle over the future of a formula that heightens extra-cognitive powers. Lacking the kinetic, push-through certitude to unclog its muddled narrative, the film is hampered by a poorly delineated backdrop of intrigue which posits that the immediate future can be constantly changed by the tiniest actions, or even knowing about it. This creates a landscape in which no character action seems to have lasting consequence, either within the story, or emotionally for the audience.

Nick Gant (Chris Evans) is a second-generation telekinetic hiding in Hong Kong, trying to live off the grid and make a living through dice games. Fulfilling a prophecy made by his father before his death, 13-year-old Cassie Holmes (Dakota Fanning) shows up at Nick’s apartment, enlisting his help in locating an important suitcase. Fleeing some Chinese assassins, their on-the-fly investigatory work leads them to Kira Hudson (Camilla Belle), Nick’s ex-girlfriend and an on-the-run “pusher” — someone with skills so advanced they can plant a thought indistinguishable from reality in a subject’s mind — who is the only telepath to have ever survived drug trial testing by “the Division,” a shadowy government group who conducts human research.

Trying desperately to bring Kira in is a Chinese family gang, as well as Henry Carver (Djimon Hounsou), a Division agent also responsible for the death of Nick’s father. Nick, Cassie and Kira hook up with some other, differently abled paranormal loafers and try to stay alive and ahead of these groups, while plotting to find the suitcase with drugs that will… save Kira? Allow them to expose the Division? The intricate final plan — in which Nick writes sealed letters to each of his cohorts, and then wipes his memory of the act — creates a circumstance by which anything can happen, untethered to any emotional reality.

The most compelling thing about Push is its setting. Director Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin) shot the film entirely on location, which affords it a fresh look and feel. David Bourla’s screenplay, though, is a jumbled mess of narrative clichés and poor execution, at once terribly conventional and needlessly complex, like it’s setting the table for a sprawling TV series. By trying to establish personal connections between characters rather than clearly establishing the rules of its tele-psychic play, Push actually raises far more questions than it ever convincingly answers. If Nick is out of practice and not very good with his telekinetic gifts in the beginning of the movie, what triggers his sudden ability to control weapons and stop bullets? If the drug-enhanced Kira is the powerful prototype for a new breed of telekinetic soldiers, why is she still susceptible to Carver’s “pushes”? If the Division is a secret American governmental organization, why would they work at all with potential rivals in the Chinese, rather than merely dispatch their own minions? If “watchers” like Cassie predict the future based on intent, why can’t one see the aforementioned plan to mask intent through sealed letters as it’s being hatched? These questions, and many more, occupy one’s mind more than actual events unfolding on screen. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Summit Entertainment, PG-13, 111 minutes)

The cinematic equivalent of Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy — a project delayed so long that many began to doubt its actual existence — Fanboys is about a group of passionate Star Wars geeks who set off on a road trip to try to see the latest film in the series before anyone else. It’s also kind of like discovering a mangled, half-eaten tin of your roommate’s chocolate crème pie in the refrigerator; it’s not wholly formed or at all pretty-looking, and you know it’s perhaps not good for you, yet you somewhat enjoy it all the same.

It’s 1999 and, several years removed from high school, young Eric Bottler (Sam Huntington) is the only one of his peer set who’s matured a bit, mostly the result of a job at his father’s car dealership. Two of his friends — Windows (Jay Baruchel) and Hutch (Balls of Fury‘s Dan Fogler, noticeably older than the rest of the characters) — kill time in hourly-rate fashion at a comic book store, along with Zoe (Kristen Bell, breathing as much energy as she can into the “spunky female” role). When they tell Eric that his semi-estranged ex-best bud Linus (Chris Marquette) has inoperable cancer, Eric revives an old scheme hatched when they were all much younger — to drive across the country, break into George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, and steal and screen a print of the hotly anticipated forthcoming prequel.

Fanboys was originally conceived and scripted at the height of Phantom Menace mania in 1998, by Ernest Cline. A decade later, however, Adam Goldberg also nets a screenwriting credit, and a handful of re-shot sequences by Steven Brill allegedly abut those of originating, credited director Kyle Newman, who shot the film a couple years ago. Not a fan of the whole terminal illness plotline, executive producer Harvey Weinstein is also reported to have tinkered heavily with a cut of the movie, which seems borne out by liberally sprinkled ADR asides.

Naturally, owing to its multiple chefs, there’s considerable schizophrenia with respect to the movie’s tone. Some of this surfaces right out of the gate, when an opening credit crawl that mimics the Star Wars series concludes with an iPhone joke, then yields to a party sequence set to Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumper,” an ultra-specific demarcation of era if ever there was one. “Wait,” one thinks, “is this going to be an honest period piece comedy or just a referential free-for-all hung loosely upon this conceit?”

Some of both, it turns out. Early on, the movie’s banter helps it seem a bit smarter (Of Mice and Men and Picasso are both amusingly evoked), and the white-hot fervor of fandom is honestly dissected in the form of a story-strand feud between Star Wars and Star Trek fans that is funny, if a bit broadly played. Before long, though, Fanboys reveals itself a peddler of desultory set pieces (a Full Monty-type male striptease, a hallucinatory drug sequence that could be nipped from an Oliver Stone flick, a half-sketched plot device involving geek-web icon Harry Knowles, as played by Ethan Suplee). And since the characters never really discuss Linus’ fate, Fanboys misses a chance to blossom into something more emotionally rooted; instead it’s just a slapstick romp. Indeed, it’s not until the end of the movie that it becomes fully apparent that Linus’ illness wasn’t actually just a fib told to get the reticent Eric on the road.

So Fanboys is in no way, shape or form a great accomplishment of filmmaking. But if there’s a saving grace to the entire enterprise, it’s the easy rapport between the lead actors, as well as the fact that it’s even more smartly cast in hindsight. (Danny McBride, Will Forte and Craig Robinson all have bit parts, Seth Rogen plays two characters to surprisingly amusing effect, and a few more star cameos figure prominently into the proceedings.) That great pedigree, and the force (pun embraced) of its loosey-goosey personality is ultimately enough to help Fanboys just scrape by with a marginal, qualified recommendation… at least for those in its fanboy target demo. (MGM/The Weinstein Company, PG-13, 90 minutes)

A space-filling genre programmer through and through, The Uninvited is one of those movies that plugs along in such avowedly unfussy, obvious fashion as to lull its audience into a shrugging sense of giggly complacency; it spends a lot of time and effort convincing folks that it’s nothing more than an exercise in stylistic manipulation. Then — aha! — comes that One Big Twist, and everything is turned upside down, leaving the audience reeling in appreciation. Right… err, right? Well, not really. No matter how wildly they reframe the narrative, story twists applied lazily just come across as weird and/or yawn-inducing, and unfortunately that’s the case here. The Uninvited isn’t quite clever enough to earn any admiration for its switcheroo finale.

The film opens with Maine teenager Anna (Emily Browning, above left) describing a terrible nightmare to her therapist. In centers around her cancer-stricken mother, who died eight months ago in a fire — an event Anna witnessed, which then led her to try to kill herself. After the therapist gives her some sunny, idiotic advice (“Go home, kiss a boy, get into trouble, finish what you started!”), Anna bounces out of the psychiatric institution where she’s been held with nary a hint of any dark clouds swirling around her, save some scars on her wrists.

Her novelist father Steven (David Strathairn) picks her up, and Anna returns home to her older sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel, above right) and Rachel (Elizabeth Banks), the live-in nurse who’s moved in on the girls’ dad. Anna gets a visit from her mother’s ghost, and when the girls find out about their father’s recent marriage proposal to Rachel, they become convinced that the mysterious interloper did their mother in — a notion Rachel’s penchant for control and breathy, menacing whispers does little to dissuade. Some Nancy Drew-style investigation ensues, and things get spookier when Anna learns of an unsolved homicide case from 10 years earlier involving an in-home caregiver named Mildred Kemp.

Based on a 2003 Korean horror film from director Kim Jee-Woon, and adapted by Craig Rosenberg, Doug Miro and Carlo Bernard, The Uninvited plays for most of its running time, as mentioned, as a very straightforward, on-the-nose, domestic thriller — a downgrade, killer-stepmom lever-puller much in the vein, narratively speaking, of The Glass House or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Milking Anna’s instability for slight pokes to the small of the back, there are visions of her Kentucky-fried mom, as well as bleeding keyholes and the like. No stringy, wet-haired Asian girls, though.

As directed by British brothers Charles and Thomas Guard, the movie makes nice use of some effective camera angles when trading in this dream-state spookery that bedevils Anna. But when it comes time for The Uninvited to wow us, and pull the rug out from under an audience, it fails. In the plainest terms, this is evident in the several weak flashbacks that comprise the movie’s post-twist scenes; clever films show you what was there all along, but you failed to consider integral. The Uninvited just lays its revelation on the table, but does nothing to earn it, or make it stick. Indeed, leaving the theater you might be reflecting back on any number of scenes, and thinking how they don’t quite fully make sense in light of the twist.

Browning has pouty, young Angelina Jolie-type lips, and is kind of a cool choice around which to center the movie, in that she isn’t conventionally va-voomish, or made out to look as such. Banks, though, is required to act significantly different depending on what a given scene calls for from her character, and in the end the script still hinges to an awkward degree on adults being required to do dumb things, in order to make Anna and Alex the center of the story, or force certain circumstances upon them. It’s a slight, to-scale success, I guess, in the sense that The Uninvited is able
to somewhat lull inattentive younger audiences into thinking they’re
watching a different kind of movie than what’s actually unfolding. The
narrative execution of its conceit, though, is fairly uninviting. (Paramount/DreamWorks, PG-13, 87 minutes)

A bristling, slickly seductive portrait of The Notorious B.I.G. (below right), the 400-pound Brooklyn rapper whose velvety flow and unparalleled rhyme style left behind a legacy that reached mythic status after he was gunned down in 1997, Notorious works most directly as a biopic, capturing the tremendous charisma and contradictions of this garrulous man-child. But the film also paints on a broad social canvas, skillfully conveying in a doomed downward spiral how the murder of one man became a symbol of the violence plaguing many inner-city American neighborhoods throughout the 1990s.

Born Christopher Wallace in 1972, The Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls (Jamal Woolard, above left), grew up a Catholic School honor student, raised in Brooklyn by his single mother Voletta (Angela Bassett), a Jamaican immigrant. Dropping out of school at 17, he turns to the flash and easy cash of drug-dealing, partially in order to help support a pregnant girlfriend. Though he lived less than 25 years, a full recounting of Biggie’s life is left with many masters to serve, even if only including the three turbulent romantic relationships — the mother of his first child, Jan (Julia Pace Mitchell), his protégé and lover “Lil’ Kim” Jones (Naturi Naughton, making a solid impression), and eventual wife Faith Evans (Antonique Smith) — that form the backbone of Notorious.

There’s much more to Biggie’s sprawling story, though: a stint in prison; two children; his mother’s bout with breast cancer; an important professional hook-up with up-and-coming producer Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs (Derek Luke); and a friendship turned feud with fellow rapper Tupac Shakur (Anthony Mackie). The latter quarrel, on wax and in bullets, would pervade their personal and professional lives for almost two years before finally turning deadly for both men.

While the same distilled narrative hurdles that make up most tragic stories about the corrosive nature of entertainment industry fame (drugs, philandering, et al) are present here, director George Tillman, Jr. (Men of Honor) has a grander backdrop in mind for Notorious. The film connects personal ambition to collective circumstance, by way of the sacrifices made for and by its fringe-dwelling main players. Biggie’s big break is only allowed to happen after a pal takes a rap for him on a gun charge, and when he raps, it reflects his own contradictions and tremendous psychological turmoil, yes, but also the dead-end desperation of his friends, and an entire neglected (economically, emotionally, and for a long time culturally) sub-class. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Fox Searchlight, R, 123 minutes)

A colorful, pleasantly cast family film, Hotel for Dogs tells the story of a group of resourceful kids who band together to turn an abandoned hotel into a tricked-out, de facto boarding home for abandoned pooches of all shapes and sizes. Whimsical and at times a bit formulaic, but never overly sentimental, the movie benefits from a strongly sketched collective adolescent point-of-view, letting its kid stars drive the action in a world full of mostly buffoonish adults.

Sixteen-year-old orphan Andi (Emma Roberts) and her younger brother Bruce (Jake Austin) have only one another. Well, each other and Friday, the little old dog that they secretly keep against the edict of their narcissistic new foster parents, Carl and Lois Scudder (Kevin Dillon and Lisa Kudrow), who pay them little mind, except to heat up an occasional microwaveable meal and point out all the things they’re doing wrong.When Friday goes missing, however, Andi and Bruce are distraught. While looking for him, they make some friends at a local pet shelter. When Friday turns up with a stray dog, and runs into a vacant hotel, Andi, Bruce and their new friends decide to turn it into a comfy permanent hiding place for all the city’s unclaimed canines. Using his mechanical skills and items strewn about the hotel, Bruce assembles gadgets — a projected car ride, a self-repeating tennis ball toss, a series of auto-flushing toilets — to keep the dogs all happily entertained, safe and fed.

Visually and emotionally, Hotel for Dogs conveys a bounciness and vibrancy that doesn’t tip over into cloying overeagerness, courtesy of debut feature director Thor Freudenthal and production designer William Sandell. The film’s strongest selling point is that, not unlike Home Alone, it strongly establishes a world in which the abandoned kids (in this case plural) still all seem to be actively in control of their own destiny. Whether thwarting some dog-catchers or devising an automated feeding system for a couple dozen dogs, they’re making the whole world they want to live in, which is a powerfully attractive story to younger audiences. To access the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Paramount/DreamWorks, PG, 100 minutes)

Yonkers Joe is partly a telegraphed drama of familial reconciliation, but also an ode to analog-era gamblers now outdated and overmatched in the age of upscale, digital-surveillance casinos. The title character (Chazz Palminteri) is a gruff East Coast cardsharp who finds his mostly uncluttered life (he has a girlfriend of equally knockabout motivation, Janice, played by Christine Lahti, but seems disinclined to opt for any sort of ordinary domesticity) suddenly complicated by his estranged, mentally challenged namesake son (Tom Guiry). Stricken with emotional and anger problems stemming from his virtual abandonment, Joey is approaching his 21st birthday, and with that milestone a forced decision — not really in his own hands — about his future residence. So with his cohorts and young Joey in tow, Joe the elder heads to Las Vegas, looking to run a loaded-dice craps scam, and score a payday that will allow him to afford posh group-home care for his son. Think of it as a patriarchal Rain Man, with a pinch of to-scale 21.

Distracting coverage problems certainly mar any hope for a smooth setting of scene, and writer-director Robert Celestino repeatedly overplays his hand with inserts that make Joe look considerably less slick than we’re led to believe. The script also doesn’t give Palminteri much to inform his character’s new-fashioned cruelty (he’s not physically abusive, but deems Joey “my sentence”), other than an absentee mother and some major avoidance issues. That leaves some of the film’s father-son drama to be sold in sheer emotive force rather than via persuasive content. But Palminteri and a passel of familiar small screen faces (did Dick Wolf cast this movie?) earn the film slight passing marks, if only mostly because it’s interesting to see old operators have to adapt their schemes for new times. (Magnolia, R, 102 minutes)

Sometimes screening schedules and the intrusions of everyday, regular life don’t align, or other assignments take precedent over films in which you might have more of an interest in a head-to-head pick ’em. Such was the case with Marley & Me, a movie that 20th Century Fox actually proactively screened, in an against-trend moment, yet I felt I could likely take or leave. The Butterscotch Stallion and the erstwhile Mrs. Brad Pitt, a rambunctious dog and some Family Circus-type familial angst… got it, check. Yet circumstances contrived to put me in a theater with a general audience over the Christmas break, and I was pleased with what unfolded.

I won’t say I was surprised, really, because I liked all the talent behind-the-scenes, which seemed to augur a competent production. I will say instead that Marley & Me is an above-the-line triumph of a different sort, because it so clearly represents an across-the-board, streamlined uniformity of vision with no sacrifice of quality; director David Frankel proves that his work on the 2006 summer smash The Devil Wears Prada was no mere source-text fluke, and Scott Frank and Don Roos, two talented screenwriters, do a great job of adapting John Grogan’s best-selling, same-named memoir with wit, clarity and heart.

The film opens with newlyweds John and Jennifer Grogan (Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston), leaving behind the harsh winters of Michigan on their wedding night, and heading south to
begin their new lives in West Palm Beach, Florida. They obtain jobs as
journalists at competing local newspapers, buy their first home, and
begin to make their way through the challenges of a new marriage, new
careers and, possibly, the life-changing decision to start a family. Unsure of his preparedness for raising children, though, John confesses his hesitation to his friend and fellow journalist Sebastian (Eric Dane), who comes up with
the perfect solution: get a puppy. “There’s nothing
to it,” says Sebastian. “You walk ’em. You feed ’em, you let ’em out
now and then.”

So the Grogans adopt a cute, little yellow Labrador and name him after reggae superstar Bob Marley. In no
time at all, though, they have a 100-pound steamroller of unbridled energy
that turns the Grogan home into a disaster area. He flunks obedience
school (mauling Kathleen Turner in the process), chews through sofa cushions and dry-wall, overturns
garbage cans, steals a Thanksgiving turkey, consumes flowers and toilet water, and chases the UPS guy. Even a
newly-purchased, expensive necklace isn’t safe from Marley’s gaping maw, which leads John to have to sift through poop for retrieval. The story marches inexorably forward, though; John becomes a weekly columnist, almost against his will, and Jenny quits her job. And amidst all the mayhem he generates, Marley helps see the
Grogans through the ups and downs of having kids, through job and home
changes, and most of all, just the myriad everyday challenges of a growing
family. Eventually, however, Marley grows old, and weak, forcing the Grogans to make some tough decisions.

Yes, Marley & Me has a couple peppy montage sequences of destruction aimed at producing squeals of delight from younger viewers. But, owing chiefly to Grogan’s source material, it also has an honest narrative backbone. This means story twists that, just like in real life, are sometimes painful — a miscarriage, a fairly late change of scenery — story twists that wouldn’t be tolerated in an originally produced screenplay. (You can practically hear the studio executive doing a spit-take: “A miscarriage?! Can’t we just have some more dog stuff… maybe some unexpected puppies?”) Frankly, I’m thrilled that all these things — as well as John’s wistful, nice-guy jealousy at Sebastian’s ascendant career arc and bachelor lifestyle — are included. They make the film what it is: deeper, more substantive, honest, and real. This is a film that happens to be rated PG, but can play to almost any age, and that happens to be somewhat about a dog, but isn’t just for dog lovers.

Other stuff that works well includes Alan Arkin — fantastic as Arnie Klein, John’s ascerbic editor — and Dane, who reduces the boil of his smarmy Grey’s Anatomy lothario to a mild simmer, to nice effect. Wilson and Aniston each do their thing as well; they make a believable, suitably charming couple, and nicely play the moments of familial drama and bickering, too. Commercially, Marley & Me has been embraced quickly out of the gate, and it’s not hard to see why, given the money pumped into its charm offensive, consisting of all those adorable posters, billboards and bus ads. But it’s a solid piece of Hollywood studio filmmaking, and those that took a pass on it thinking it was “only” a dog movie would do well to reconsider their first reaction. (20th Century Fox, PG, 123 minutes)

Since his memorably shirtless introduction to the broader filmgoing public in 1991’s Thelma & Louise, Brad Pitt has alternately run from (Twelve Monkeys) and embraced (Troy) his status as a heartthrob pin-up. It’s ironically fitting, then, that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button re-teams Pitt with filmmaker David Fincher, his Seven and Fight Club director, as a man who mysteriously ages in reverse.



Born an arthritic, wrinkled mass in 1918 New Orleans (he could be kin to the baby from Eraserhead), Benjamin is abandoned by his birth father (Jason Flemyng), and raised in doting fashion by Queenie (Taraji Henson), an African-American nursing home attendant. Though not originally given long to live, Benjamin grows up and fits in amidst these aged folk, his tottering facilities and simple interests matching theirs. It’s here that he meets Daisy (Cate Blanchett), a precocious adolescent who eventually blossoms into a world-class ballerina.

As Benjamin undergoes a physical de-maturation, a sense of wanderlust develops. He gets work on a tugboat, which in turn takes him to ports around the world. Tangentially, in this manner he sees service during World War II. In the spring of 1962, though, Benjamin and Daisy reconnect for good, their biological ages converging. In love, they move into a duplex together back in New Orleans. When Daisy eventually announces that she’s pregnant, though, Benjamin is forced to grapple with their diverging futures.

Truth told, there isn’t much fault to be found in the film with the direction of Fincher, who marshals an impressive array of detailed, enveloping production design and mostly convincing effects work. No, the movie’s sins are of the first-trimester variety, story flaws that set the narrative off on the wrong, wobbly path. Benjamin Button is a curious film in many respects, including as a vehicle for Pitt, who has to play a placid, reactive character. Forrest Gump will strike many as an obvious comparison — another central figure blithely bobbing through history, with both films penned by screenwriter Eric Roth, to boot. But simpleton Forrest still acted in ways that indicated a self-interest, whereas Benjamin is in one sense a hostage to circumstance, but also little more than a blank slate upon which an audience is meant to project their own wistful pasts, and trapped or uncertain futures.

Because of this, wide swatches of the movie’s first two acts — time at the nursing home, time at sea and a foreign-set love affair with the wife (Tilda Swinton) of an English diplomat — seem like time injudiciously spent. In all honesty, an expansion of the film’s final half hour would have made for a much more interesting and dramatically wrought experience. But Roth and Fincher duck the hard, heavy questions.

Most damningly, there’s also a puzzling incuriousity about the central conceit, Benjamin’s affliction. All the characters around him, to the extent that they acknowledge his condition at all, just shrug and marvel, and we never see Benjamin seek medical opinion as an adult, which seems baffling, especially when he opts for a life ordered of domesticity with Daisy. I understand that this isn’t necessarily in keeping with the more esoteric, emotionally-based ruminations about mortality for which the film is aiming, but it further underscores Benjamin’s problematic passivity as a character, and it renders the movie little more than an ornate bauble.

Finally, the film’s modern day framing device, with Hurricane Katrina bearing down on a deathbed-stricken Daisy while her adult daughter, Caroline (Julia Ormand), holds vigil, has a doubly distinct disadvantage. First, it doesn’t pay off with any true catharsis. Furthermore, it again sets Benjamin apart, since Caroline reads from a diary that we’ve never seen him keep. It’s yet another gauzy scrim of separation between the audience and this fascinating but oblique, unknowable protagonist, another way for us to observe and hear him but not feel the depth or clarity of any of his emotions. (Paramount, PG-13, 167 minutes)

On the verge of losing his job, rundown New Yorker jingle writer Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) flies to London for a weekend to attend his daughter’s wedding, but promises to be back on Monday morning to make an important meeting. He arrives to learn his daughter has chosen her stepfather to walk her down the aisle instead of him. Devastated, Harvey leaves the wedding before the reception, misses his plane and ends up drowning his sorrows at the airport bar, where he strikes up a conversation with Kate Walker (Emma Thompson), a slightly prickly, 40-something singleton whose life is limited to work, the occasional humiliating blind date and endless phone calls from her smothering, delusional mother, Maggie (Eileen Atkins). The growing connection between the pair energizes and inspires both of them, even as they grapple with difficulties of adult-onset romance.

Not yet 40, British-born writer-director Joel Hopkins (Jump Tomorrow) perhaps doesn’t have the necessary life experience to pull off the injection of a credible depth of feeling into this tale. The resultant harmless inconsequentiality is a lumpy, sentimental mass that clumsily strikes many of the familiar surface keys of melancholic regret. But there’s a crinkle-eyed mischievousness that pokes through in Hoffman’s performance and robs the character — and thus the movie as a whole — of a chance at something darker, and more arresting. (As Harvey’s grown but still wounded and emotionally distant daughter Susan, it’s Liane Balaban who makes a lasting impression.) Hopkins doesn’t necessarily want to play on that field, but he should, since his film doesn’t have the wit to compete with Something’s Gotta Give, the movie that it most clearly wants to emulate. Ergo, when the silly montage of Kate trying on dresses inevitably arrives, you don’t forgive it and just go with the flow of the movie, you turn on the film, and hold a grudge. (Overture Films, PG-13, 99 minutes)

Alone except for her dog Lucy, a retriever, and some vaguely defined dreams of a new life, Indiana native Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) is driving through the Pacific Northwest to Alaska, in hopes of a summer of lucrative work at a fish cannery. When her car breaks down in a sleepy, boarded-up Oregon mining town, however, the thin fabric of her already tenuous financial situation comes apart, and she confronts a series of increasingly dire economic decisions, with far-ranging repercussions for herself and Lucy.

Working from a screenplay written with her Old Joy collaborator Jon Raymond, director Kelly Reichardt uses a formal minimalist style to construct an emotionally impressionistic road movie that feels rudderless in ways mostly enthralling but also sometimes frustrating. A carefully observed film about sympathy and generosity at the dirty-fingernailed edges of American life (one is reminded of the refrain from U2’s “One” — “we get to carry each other” — about the privilege of shared sacrifice), Wendy and Lucy also touches on the limits and depths of people’s duty to one another. If the film sputters a bit in conveying much of substance about what Wendy thinks about her predicament, Williams herself is never less than hypnotizing. And in the current recessional times, the film’s blank canvas and broadly sketched melancholic tones serve as an empty vessel for those who would watch a film and like to turn the personal into the political. (Oscilloscope/filmscience, R, 80 minutes)

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)

John Travolta lends his voice to the animated family film Bolt as the namesake star, a dog who goes on a wild cross-country journey to reunite with his young owner. Sharply drawn supporting characters, a solid narrative hook and slickly constructed action-adventure sequences help make for a vibrant, engaging, feel-good treat that will connect strongly with especially younger viewers.

For super-dog Bolt, every day is filled with adventure, danger and intrigue. The canine best friend of young Penny (voiced by Miley Cyrus), Bolt is the unwitting star of a hit TV show built around a variety of Hollywood-created powers, like heat vision, improbably long leaps and a “super bark” that can overturn cars. When he’s accidentally shipped from his soundstage home all the way to New York, Bolt sets off on a cross-country journey back to Penny.

At first convinced that all his amazing abilities have just been weakened by styrofoam packing peanuts, Bolt eventually learns the truth about the phony, Truman Show-like construction of his sheltered world. Still, Bolt pines for the only person he’s felt loved by and really known his entire life, so with the help of two unlikely traveling companions — a jaded, abandoned housecat named Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman) and a TV-obsessed hamster named Rhino (voiced by Mark Walton) — he heads west, finally discovering he doesn’t need superpowers to be a hero.

Owing to its show-within-a-show conceit, Bolt has ample opportunity for amped-up action, and co-directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard stage some madly kinetic scenes, including a wild, brawny opening sequence that pays homage to a few bits from The Matrix series. The core of the movie, however, lies in the bewildered interactions of its contrasting personalities, and Mittens, Rhino and several different groups of pigeons they encounter along the way all serve as amusing foils for Bolt.

The film looks quite appealing. In design, there’s a soft, painterly style to many of the film’s backgrounds, more than a bit evocative of hand-drawn animation of years gone by. The interplay between characters, shadow and foregrounded objects is uniformly fantastic, and subtly different lighting schemes are evidenced in various parts of the country during Bolt’s travels, including Ohio, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

It’s a sign of the overall, deftly sketched success of Bolt’s action sequences and big emotional moments that one is free to nitpick about a few inconsistent character bits, as when Mittens teaches Bolt the joys of simple “dog stuff,” like sticking his head out of a moving car window, or playing fetch. These are all things that Bolt would still be familiar with; they seem only designed to pad out a montage. It’s also somewhat curious just how little substantive emotional investment there is in Bolt’s eventual recognition of his lack of powers. It’s about an inch thick, as if Bolt‘s makers didn’t think the film could handle the momentary drag. None of this will matter much to younger audiences, though.

Travolta’s vocal performance dutifully hits the emotional beats required in each scene, but — whether because of some of the aforementioned incongruities or just wandering focus — seems to lack a strong, codifying personality apart from Bolt’s quest. It’s a case of movie star casting slightly overshadowing animated character. There’s no such qualm with Disney star Cyrus. She delivers a tremendously sympathetic turn as Penny, and the heartfelt yearning in her voice immediately summons a strong audience connection to their own childhood pets. It’s in-house story artist and part-time voice actor Walton who really steals the show, though. Embodying the notion that everyone is the star of their own narrative, he puts a funny spin on the energetic, blinkered Rhino. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Disney, PG, 96 minutes)

An intimate Irish drama about a married couple in crisis, Eden centers on Breda (Eileen Walsh) and Billy Farrell (Aidan Kelly), a seemingly normal pair approaching their 10th wedding anniversary. In private, their marriage shows signs of strain. As Billy begins to obsess over a younger woman, Breda searches for a way to preserve their bond, focusing on a shared night out at the pub as the solution to their malaise.

Adapted by Eugene O’Brien from his own stageplay, and skillfully directed by Declan Recks, Eden avoids many of the gritty, hand-held photographed clichés associated with the early kitchen-sink dramas of Mike Leigh, with which this film otherwise shares a few things in common. It’s spare, but never aggressively so, and constructed with a nice sense of composition. Walsh (The Magdalene Sisters) ably locates the desperate sadness at the core of Breda, yet Kelly (who looks like a cross between Colm Feore and Will Arnett, with a few minor acne scars) also deftly conveys how simple shame can color and warp personal choices. Watching him try to negotiate time and space at the local watering hole between his wife and a silent crush summons forth an angsty, melancholic adult version of the old sitcom story chestnut about juggling two prom dates. What on the surface seems a simple case of a wandering male eye, though, by the end of the film becomes a bit more complex, and heartrending. There’s a palpable tension in the air because one wants to see matters reconciled, and these characters stay together.

There is undeniably an element of distancing cultural specificity to the movie (something confirmed by a recent piece in Newsweek about the dramatic effect that the rash of British and Irish pub closings were having on respective national psyches), but at its core Eden is about romantic hope dangling on a string, and the curious, cavernous spaces between men and women, even — maybe especially — those who love each other. Surely that’s a universal story… no matter how briar patch-thick the accents are.For more information on the film, click here. (Liberation Entertainment, unrated, 83 minutes)

From Shallow Grave and Trainspotting to Millions and 28 Days Later, the filmography of Danny Boyle is littered with many different types of movies, but they’re all marked by a similar intensity and forward-leaning energy. It’s somewhat strangely appropriate, then, that for his latest film, the bristling, underclass love story Slumdog Millionaire, the British-born Boyle would head to the slums of India, where life is lived in fast-forward.

With a population of 19 million and still growing rapidly, Mumbai is, by most estimates, set to overtake Tokyo in a decade’s time as the world’s most populous city. The high-contrast mix of heartbreaking poverty, crime, technological advancement and surging, aspirant optimism all make for a perfectly jumbled, Dickensian backdrop for an engaging drama about a dirt-poor orphan who stands poised on the precipice of winning 20 million rupees on an Indian game show.

Scrawny 18 year-old Jamal Malik (Dev Pate, above leftl) nurses a crush on Latika (Freida Pinto, above right), a fellow street urchin whom he’s known since a hardscrabble childhood shared with his brother Salim (Madhur Mittal). Now, with a whole nation watching, laconic Jamal is just one question away from winning the jackpot on India’s version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? But when the show breaks for the evening, at the behest of its preening, patronizing host (Anil Kapoor) police arrest Jamal on suspicion of cheating. Desperate to prove his innocence, Jamal tells the police inspector (Irfan Khan) the story of his life in the slum where he and his brother grew up — of their many adventures, of vicious encounters with local gangs, and of course of Latika, the girl he’s loved and yet repeatedly lost.

Slumdog Millionaire is more than passingly reminiscent of Fernando Meirelles’ Oscar-nominated City of God, in the manner in which, within the framework of a fraternal narrative, it assays crippling poverty, and the doom it often portends. Yet I also found myself thinking again and again of Oliver Twist and, unlikely though it may seem, Romeo & Juliet. Boyle’s film opens in the present day, but then jumps back and forth in time, with each chapter of Jamal’s increasingly layered story revealing where he learned answers to the show’s increasingly difficult trivia questions. This approach helps give the movie a sense of fated, epic scale, no matter the relatively meager $14 million budget.

As with many of his films, including his last one, Sunshine, Boyle’s visual approach is heavy on canted angles and color saturation. Unlike that film, though, cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantel’s work here is a much more natural match with the story, imploring a deeper identification with the space, and thus the characters. Boyle’s deft artistry even extends to the film’s subtitles (roughly the first third is in Hindi), which are unfold on differently color backgrounds, spread across the screen. Exotic, but never condescendingly so, Slumdog Millionaire locates the lamplight of human desire, and proves that it burns all across the world, no matter circumstance, ethnicity or religion. (Fox Searchlight, R, 120 minutes)

A brisk, affecting and tightly coiled documentary snapshot of the transformative power of moral courage, Pray the Devil Back to Hell tells the remarkable story of a group of fed-up women whose demonstrations and non-violent demands for peace finally helped transform their war-ravaged homeland of Liberia. During a brutal, decade-long campaign that displaced one-third of the country’s population, Liberia’s poor were held hostage between self-anointed President Charles Taylor and thuggish warlord factions jockeying for their own future power. Standing up against rape, murder and child militias, the struggle of these women would eventually culminate with the exile of Taylor and the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first elected female head of state.

Giving wide berth to their inspiring interview subjects, director Gina Reticker and originating producer Abigail Disney construct a film that is heart-rending and enraging in equal measure, even if they don’t scratch much beyond the surface of some of the more interesting subcomponents of the story — which include the potentially fractious working union between Christian and Muslim congregations, as well as a coercive sex strike to bend husbands to their cause. Human understanding and betterment are achieved mostly through bearing witness, and this film, similar in mission to the work of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, provides powerful firsthand testimony of the capacity for decency to eventually trump evil. For more information on the film, click here. (Balcony Releasing, unrated, 72 minutes)

A performance-centric adaptation of a powerhouse piece of stagecraft about a potential case of child abuse, John Patrick Shanley’s big screen translation of his own 2005 Tony Award-winning play Doubt is an effectively ambiguous, high-pedigree adult drama that entangles viewers in slow, sure-handed fashion. Intimately constructed, tightly wound and above all trusting of an audience’s appreciation for textual subtlety, the film is sure to be short-listed in several top-shelf categories this awards season.

Steeped in implied emotional blackmail, Doubt is thematically reminiscent of David Mamet’s Oleanna, another streamlined, muted, character-focused piece hinging on variable audience interpretation of a charged interpersonal (though in this case offscreen) event. Peddling as a grander, more bitterly personalized conflict the moral inscrutability at Doubt‘s center might help expand its box office prospects beyond the otherwise core constituency of upscale drama fans. Regardless, considerable critical and awards attention will power mid-level box office when it releases Stateside on December 12, and international interest should be fairly strong as well given the film’s heavy religious overtones.

Set in 1964, the film unfolds at St. Nicholas, a private Catholic academy in the Bronx where all the middle school students cringe at being sent to the imperious Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the principal who believes in the power of fear and discipline. Much more sympathetic to the difficulties of adolescence is Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the relatively new parish priest who seems attuned to the waves of societal change spreading across the country.

When Father Flynn seems to take a special interest in the school’s first African-American student, Donald (Joseph Foster II), it triggers suspicion in history teacher Sister Marie James (Amy Adams), who reports her concerns to Sister Beauvier. Despite a lack of any firm evidence other than her own surging sense of moral certainty, Sister Beauvier becomes convinced of Father Flynn’s inappropriate sexual advances upon young Donald, and ignites a battle of wills in an effort to oust him from the school. Is he guilty, and will he confess?

In adapting the material for the screen, Shanley neither tries to greatly expand the scope of the story, nor fetishize or inflate the narrative with fancy directorial tricks. Quite to the contrary, in fact; shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins in muted tones that seemingly convey the autumnal chill of the air, even indoors, the movie frequently feels as if it takes place in its own sealed snow globe, in the best possible sense. In keeping with the piece’s theatrical roots, Shanley also uses weather cues, both onscreen and in the sound mix, as signifiers of mood or emotional gravitas.

The centerpiece is a fabulous sequence between Flynn and Sisters Beauvier and James, in which tea and the pretense of a discussion about the coming Christmas play give way to a much more direct confrontation than we’ve seen coming. Shanley directs notably this extended scene, but also a few others, essentially as chess matches — letting the audience observe characters feeling out one another, deciding how much to say, and when to finally flash their swallowed irritation or indignation. Given that so many films trade in only the quick turn of emotion necessary to immediately advance plot, it’s a rare treat to watch the full arc of an emotional reaction in several self-contained scenes. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Miramax, PG-13, 104 minutes)

Adapted from John Boyne’s award-winning novel of the same name, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas opens with a quote that characterizes childhood as being a carefree period before “the dark hour of reason grows.” While generally true, there’s not much of that apple-cheeked optimism in this well-crafted World War II drama, told from a child’s-eye view. The quote, rather, serves as counterpoint for a prism through which prejudice, dehumanization and corrupted innocence are all assayed in quasi-fabulistic fashion.

The film unfolds through the eyes of eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield, above), son of Nazi commandant Ralf (David Thewlis) and Elsa (Vera Farmiga), a stay-at-home mother who embraces willful obliviousness with regards to her husband’s soldierly duties. Largely shielded from the realities of war, and certainly his father’s complicity in its grim prosecution, Bruno grumbles at having to move away from his friends and out to the country, where his family settles into a large house with a distant view of a commune-style barn where all the “farmers” wear strange pajamas. With no children with which to play, Bruno befriends a kitchen worker named Pavel (David Hayman), a pitiful, shuffling older man who in another life was a doctor.

After a week of hanging around the house, Bruno sneaks out through the back garden in search of adventure. He finally stumbles across Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a mousy Jewish boy at the nearby fence-ringed farm — which is of course plainly evident to the audience a concentration camp under Ralf’s newly expanded oversight — and a forbidden friendship develops between the pair. A visiting tutor hired by his father lectures him that all Jews are evil, and his older sister Gretel (Amber Beattie) eagerly drinks the nationalistic propagandistic Kool-Aid, but Bruno is conflicted. His bond with Shmuel is growing deeper, and senses are awakening that Bruno didn’t even know he had. How will this secret friendship play out?

Photographed by Benoit Delhomme (The Proposition), The Boy in the Striped Pajamas isn’t designed in as crushingly bleak a fashion as something like Lajos Koltai’s monochromatic Fateless, a fellow Holocaust tale told from the perspective of a young boy. With wide angles and uncluttered frames, screenwriter-director Mark Herman (Little Voice) aims for a more naturalistic palette, to underscore the movie’s humanistic tone.

What most helps the film, though, is the wide-eyed Butterfield. Physically resembling a cross between a young Elijah Wood and Son of Rambow‘s Bill Milner, he wonderfully captures Bruno’s naivete without ever tipping over into affected cuteness. The rest of the performances are nicely modulated as well. The pitfall of many World War II films is that they try to retell a grand story on a cramped canvas, but The Boy in the Striped Pajamas tells a discrete, moving, standalone tale from a specific point-of-view, and just tells it quite well. (Miramax, PG-13, 93 minutes)

A superbly cast comedy that for the most part successfully balances a surface crassness with the requisite eventual emotional maturation and bonding of more conventional mainstream fare, Role Models manages to locate and till fresh ground in the ascendant guys-behaving-badly sub-genre of American studio comedies.

Anson Wheeler (Seann William Scott) and Danny Donahue (Paul Rudd) are a pair of Minotaur
Energy Drink reps who make their living traveling from school to
school peddling their product as a hip, safe alternative to drugs. For
unrepentant ladies man Wheeler, this is the high life. Danny, however,
is bitter and listless. Haranguing coffee shop employees over the
language they use to sell their product, he has a sardonic,
hair-trigger temper that frustrates his live-in, long-time lawyer
girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks).

When a public outburst lands the duo community service, Danny and
Wheeler are assigned to “Sturdy Wings,” a mentorship program run by a
former addict (Jane Lynch). There, Danny is paired with Augie
(Christopher Mintz-Plasse), an introverted teenager obsessed with medieval,
live-action interactive role-play, and Wheeler is paired with the
younger Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson), a fatherless kid prone to foul-mouthed
outbursts. Various mishaps ensue. Initially attempting to just bide
their time and clock the necessary hours to fulfill their
court-mandated obligation, Danny and Wheeler soon find themselves
caring, against their previous instincts.

Multi-hyphenate David Wain, who honed his skills with the comedy
collective The State, has impeccable skill at crafting self-contained
scenes, but neither does he sell out the nature of his characters in
any of these discrete bits, as in so often the case in small screen
sitcoms.

A big part of Role Models‘ success stems simply from the superb comic
timing and expertly orchestrated interactions of its cast, who are for
the most part very familiar with one another. Rudd, who receives his
first screenplay credit on Role Models, has a working history with his
co-writers dating back to 2001’s summer camp send-up Wet Hot American
Summer, which also served as Wain’s directorial debut.

But there’s also much to be said for the quality of the banter and the
specificity of the often age-inappropriate commentaries that inform
Danny and Wheeler’s attempts to relate to their young pupils (eyeing
Augie with exasperation, Danny invokes comparison to composer Marvin
Hamlisch, while Wheeler at one point imparts explicit insight about the
sexual metaphor of Kiss’ “Love Gun”). Some of the set-ups feel familiar, and the film’s energy does flag a
bit when required to highlight a moment of growth, as when Danny tells
off Augie’s parents. Still, the across-the-board strength of the
performances makes these pop-storytelling concessions easy enough to
swallow. Rudd’s seething deadpan resentment and Scott’s libidinal
recklessness make for a fun pairing. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Universal, R, 99 minutes)