An exercise in guerrilla-style genre
filmmaking that reframes a classic monster movie conceit as a post-September 11
allegory of big city trepidation, new Internet sensation Cloverfield emerges from the cocoon of its pre-release hype as thrilling
piece of terror tailor-made for our times. Skillfully evoking more dread than
lasting cathartic release, the sensibly-budgeted film should make its mark as
the first hit of 2008, connecting strongly with the 18-34-year-old demographic
and other genre fans looking for comfortably familiar stories with exciting new
trappings.

Like 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, which took advantage of nascent Internet
marketing to whip audience interest into a fervor, Cloverfield is an exercise in “found footage” subjectivity, unfolding
completely in handheld style, with often canted or shaky camerawork. Crucial to
whether Cloverfield commercially connects
anything at all like that film, which rang up $140 million domestically and
another $110 million internationally, is the question of whether mainstream audiences
unfamiliar with its pre-release branding buy tickets.

At the very least Cloverfield should easily outpace Snakes on a Plane — the last big pre-release, viral marketing sensation,
which ended up pulling in a disappointing $60 million worldwide. But while PG-13
films like 2005’s White Noise ($90
million worldwide), Boogeyman ($67
million internationally) and Hide and
Seek ($122 million worldwide) have proven there’s a January market for
supernatural-tinged thrillers, courting the portion of that core audience that
may be resistant to outright monster flicks will determine its final box office
tally. To its advantage, Cloverfield
arrives with a much bigger buzz, thanks to the participation of producer and Lost hit-maker J.J. Abrams, as well as
its unique style and framing device. These elements, plus its superb execution,
give the movie top-shelf ancillary value that will ensure both profitability and
potential spin-offs for other platforms and outlets.

Like The
Blair Witch Project, the film chronicles the plight of a group of young
people fighting for their lives trapped in an unforgiving outdoors, in this
case an urban jungle under siege by a gargantuan rampaging monster, and
hundreds of hostile smaller, scurrying creatures which pose every bit as much
of a threat. The film opens chillingly, with a silent
title card that stamps the subsequent video camera footage as a found audiovisual
document, from the U.S. military. The first portion of the tape reveals the tender morning
after a hook-up between long-time friends Rob (Michael David-Stahl) and Beth
(Odette Yustman). The videotape, and thus the movie, then leaps forward a
month, to the evening of a huge going-away party for Rob, who’s preparing to
move to Japan as part of a big promotion.

Tasked by his girlfriend Lily (Jessica
Lucas) with recording the event, Rob’s brother, Jason (Mike Vogel), passes off
the duty to friend Hud (T.J. Miller), who fruitlessly tries to engage Marlena
(Lizzy Caplan) in flirtatious small talk. The party takes a turn for the
awkward when Beth shows up with another guy. Rob’s suppressed feelings of affection
come bubbling to the surface, words are spoken in anger, and Beth leaves.

Suddenly, a massive jolt shakes the remaining
revelers, and the power goes out. As the group heads outside to see what
exactly has happened, fireballs explode on the horizon, and utter havoc is unleashed.
After one route of evacuation is sealed, Rob receives a distraught cell phone
message from Beth, and becomes determined to make his way to her apartment to
try to find her. Friends in tow, the group sets out, but when the destruction
and fighting on the streets between the creature and the National Guard gets
too intense, they seek shelter underground, and try to traverse subterranean subway
tracks.

Nicely balancing confusion and
interpersonal anxiety with these grander, under-siege segments, Drew Goddard’s
screenplay is a thing a pared down grace and lean, muscular virtuosity. It
starts by sketching out the underpinnings of character in fine fashion. After
18 brisk, well-plotted minutes of typically angsty young adult introduction, the
movie yields to mayhem — basically an hour-long dash through urban hell.

As with other apocalyptic and sci-fi
movies, Cloverfield squeezes some
bedazzlement out of the destruction of familiar, iconic buildings and
monuments. Here it’s the Brooklyn Bridge, in a grim obliteration that serves as the film’s first mass-scale,
panicky set piece. There’s also the beheaded Statue of Liberty, which arrives
early in the movie, and additionally serves as the perfect visual metaphor for America’s
still-lingering apprehension over the state of world events and its own
security. Yet director Matt Reeves (a co-creator of
TV’s Felicity, whose other feature
credit is 1996’s The Pallbearer) also
proves himself effective at simplistic evocative imagery, as with a coachman-less
horse-drawn carriage wandering through Central
Park.

Key to substantial gratification with Cloverfield are two bits of necessary surrender:
succumbing to its overall framing device, and accepting the notion that such
trauma unfolds against a PG-13 backdrop, which is only really a matter of
language, coming after movies like Superbad
and the Hostel films have made coarse exclamatory talk integral to their stamp of “realism” within their respective
genres. The action sequences here — including a bravura night-vision attack in the
subway tunnel — are so tensely effective as to eradicate any legitimate
quibbles with the rating for the rest of movie, a problem that arguably plagued Live Free or Die Hard last summer, at least in advance of its release.

Cineastes holding on steadfastly to the notion
that less is more may balk at the degree to which the film reveals its monster.
While it’s true that this does, if not undercut, at least muddy the water with
respect to the movie’s metaphorical associations, it’s interestingly handled
within the framework of the film, and seems a commercial tip of the cap as much
as anything. It’s undeniable that Cloverfield
is, at its core, a metaphor for the terror and uncertainty of the real world,
from its aforementioned iconic poster image and willfully vague tagline (“Some
thing has found us”), which makes no mention of a CGI monster on which millions
of dollars was spent, to specific dialogue of choking despondency (“I don’t
know why this is happening”). It’s incidentally a monster thriller. Like much
good cinema, Cloverfield works on multiple levels.
For the full, slightly longer original review, from Screen International, click here.

Directed by Rob Reiner and starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, The Bucket List, which goes wide this weekend to 2,900 theaters after opening in limited fashion on Christmas Day, bears an achingly appropriate and on-the-nose title, carrying as
it does such a load of Hollywood convention. A slice of hammy,
moralizing old-school life lessons learned, wrapped around a few
colorful set pieces of Centrum Silver catharsis, the movie is like a
vitamin pill; it’s a compact means of conveyance for several of those
old chestnuts of interpersonal guidance that always get trotted out for
the holidays: do good, don’t live timidly and forgive quickly.

The
story centers around a pair of old guys from very different tax
brackets, each stricken with cancer and given a grim prognosis.
Millionaire businessman Edward Cole (Nicholson) has made a career,
we’re led to believe, out of cutting costs if not corners in operating
medical facilities all across the nation. Carter Chambers (Freeman),
meanwhile, is a humble auto mechanic and Jeopardy
buff who’s lived a simple life in service of his wife Virginia (Beverly
Todd), children and grandchildren. When the two secondhand lions are
relegated to roommate status (it would look very bad if Edward were
given a private room after just having lobbied against them so
publicly, his chirpy assistant Thomas, played by Sean Hayes, informs
him), Edward develops an unlikely affinity for Carter. Faced with his
own mortality, Carter grabs a nearby pad and starts to sketch out a
quick inventory of things he would have liked to do in his life. He
eventually crumples up the piece of paper, though. Edward finds it, and
enthusiastically seizes upon Carter’s idea.

Sentimentality and air-quote adventure are thus ladled on in equal
servings, as — funded by Edward’s seemingly bottomless personal fortune
— the pair go skydiving, travel the world and talk about opportunities
missed and silences held too long. Audiences are meant to emotionally
connect with this fraternal bonding — and especially the predicament
Edward faces in a needlessly complicated estrangement from his
daughter — but they may be too distracted by the green-screen work at
the Great Pyramids that makes the movie seem like a strange, lost Stargate episode, or how curiously bungled the arc is involving Carter explaining all his travels with Edward to his wife.

The Bucket List is being sold in rather indolent fashion on the
salty, wrinkly appeal of its two leads, and a few of their quips and
asides. Ergo, you have trailers and heavy-rotation TV ads with the
skydiving clips, Carter good-naturedly chiding Edward “Sonny Jim”
during a race car segment, and Edward (in inimitable Nicholson fashion)
dismissively telling his assistant Thomas, “Nobody cares what you
think.” By golly,
one could think, this is the perfect, long-awaited counterweight to
something like Grumpy Old Men, about finding bliss and true release in the autumn of one’s years. The problem is that Justin Zackham’s script
doesn’t really rise to meet one’s preconceptions of the material,
however emotionally resonant or pleasantly indulgent they may be.

Somehow both manipulative and overly simplistic, The Bucket List
is a film of half-steps and pat, overly measured sequences; whether it’s
scenes of Edward’s sickness or him angrily
rejecting Carter’s attempt at broaching a reconciliation with his
daughter, nothing much rings in-close-up true about this shared
journey. There isn’t a convincing sense of the significant class
barriers smashed — Edward and Carter fall into fast friendship like
kindergarten classmates assigned to the same roundtable. To their
nominal credit, Nicholson and Freeman each do their thing, in
characteristic fashion, and that’s certainly enough to please
undemanding viewers wanting only to see the two legendary actors
together in frame. But this claptrap — evidencing no truly substantial
emotional investment from anyone involved — is recycled, formulaic
poignance, something Hollywood has provided buckets of over the years. For the full original review, from FilmStew, click here. (Warner Bros., PG-13, 96 minutes)

Well cast, slickly produced and performed with enough spirit to counterbalance its frequently stupendous lack of both originality and plausibility, 27 Dresses pulls all the right levers for (mostly female) diehard romantic comedy audiences looking for just a pinch of wistfulness to go along with their recognizable fulfillment, and should therefore achieve modest commercial success for its efforts.



Having successfully transitioned from television to the big screen with last summer’s hit comedy Knocked Up, Grey’s Anatomy star Katherine Heigl tries on a more tailor-fitted form of movie stardom with this glossy, undemanding tale of romantic angst. Aimed firmly at the same white-collar female set that helped 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and its 2004 sequel earn a combined $520 million worldwide, 27 Dresses taps into the same sort of ticking-clock anxiety associated with unrequited workplace crushes and dreaded “singledom” while approaching 30 years old.

Young, New York City professional Jane Nichols (Heigl) has always been good at taking care of others, as an opening flashback to 1986 shows us, with little Jane saving the day for a distraught bride. Her adult life has followed suit. Jane has a job at Urban Everest, a thinly defined outerwear company and “eco-friendly philanthropic business” headed up by her boss, George Casey (Edward Burns), on whom she nurses a not-so-secret crush to which he is naturally oblivious. She also has a closet full of 27 bridesmaid dresses of rather dubious fashion sense.

Jane’s problems boil down to the fact that she can’t say no, and that she always subjugates her own feelings and wishes to make others happy. Her unerring attention to detail, though, makes her the perfect person to plan bridal showers and all the other attendant details leading up to a wedding. One memorable evening, she even shuttles back and forth between two receptions, a feat witnessed by Kevin Doyle (James Marsden, above right), a New York Journal reporter who realizes that a story about this wedding junkie might be his ticket off the newspaper’s bridal beat.

After he finds her meticulously annotated planner, Kevin doggedly ingratiates himself into Jane’s life, and the two lock horns in jesting fashion, exchanging repartee on love and marriage. Jane also finds her world further turned upside down when her blithely self-centered younger sister, Tess (Malin Akerman), comes for a visit and immediately captures George’s heart. One quickie proposal later, Jane suddenly finds herself having to help plan Tess’ wedding to the guy she thinks is the perfect man for her.

Choreographer turned director Anne Fletcher (Step Up) elicits engaging performances from her actors, and generally keeps things moving at a nice pace. Leaning heavily on close-ups of Heigl, Fletcher and cinematographer Peter James come up with a fairly bright look for the movie, but the damning tradeoff is that at no point does 27 Dresses remotely capture any sense of big city verve or energy on par with The Devil Wears Prada or The Nanny Diaries. Taking scarcely any advantage of outdoor locations, this is a film set in New York City entirely incidentally. It feels boxed in and small.

Aline Brosh McKenna’s screenplay is comprised of plenty of cutesy contrivances (needing to get certain characters together, Jane is somehow left to register gifts for Tess, as well as attend a tasting alone with George), but does offer up some nice dialogue, chiefly in the form of banter between Jane and Kevin, and also benefits from having just a bit of real bite, in two arguments between Jane and Tess. If the too-tidy ending puts a bow on things and resolves matters in overly simplistic, conciliatory fashion, one finds it hard to hold too much of a lasting grudge since the film makes clear from frame one that, narratively speaking, feel-good familiarity will trump innovation.

Heigl’s more dramatic small screen work on Grey’s Anatomy helps give Jane a certain rootedness. In small, cut glances and swallowed sighs, one feels the palpable melancholy of her over-accommodating nature without it ever detracting from the movie’s generally peppy tone. Marsden is given a rather falsely cynical character, so it’s to his credit that he abandons any shades of grey and merely plays Kevin as smiling, flippant and glib. After spending the X-Man films largely sentenced to life behind the visor of his character, Cyclops, it’s pleasantly surprising to see Marsden get a chance to cut loose with lighter characters, as in Enchanted and here. For the full, original review, from Screen International, click here. (20th Century Fox, PG-13, 111 minutes)

Paul Thomas Anderson has never been one to play it safe. Whereas plenty of indie directors
gladly cede to a bit of formula for the security of financing,
Anderson’s films have almost gotten progressively more idiosyncratic
and left-of-center. That trend continues with his fifth feature film, the bold oil-boom epic There Will Be Blood.

Whatever one thinks of it, there isn’t any apt way to characterize There Will Be Blood except as a striking work, and almost inarguably by someone of great
virtuosity. Even for a filmmaker who has reveled in the heyday of the
San Fernando Valley porn boom (Boogie Nights), made it rain frogs (Magnolia) and centered a story of emotional constipation and romantic bloom partially around pudding rebates (Punch-Drunk Love),
this is an audacious film. It’s also a polarizing, punishing work, sure
to alienate a decent portion of whatever small band of mainstream
moviegoers it may woo to theaters, even as it carves out a loyal group
of defenders amongst the intelligentsia.

Using the basic narrative template of Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel “Oil!” as a jumping-off point, There Will Be Blood
unfolds over the course of a couple decades, against the provocative
and combustible frontier of California’s turn-of-the-20th-century
petroleum boom. The story chronicles the life and times of Daniel
Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis),
a straight-talking but slightly amoral would-be businessman who
transforms himself from a down-and-out silver miner into a self-made,
independent oil tycoon raising his son by himself.

A brutal mineshaft accident busts open his nose and fractures
his leg, but gives Plainview a small stake from which to start. When he
taps an underground vein, more money follows. Then Plainview gets a mysterious tip
from a strange passerby, Paul Sunday (Little Miss Sunshine‘s Paul Dano), that there’s a little town out west where oil is literally oozing right
up out of the ground. Sensing opportunity, Plainview sets out with his
right-hand man, Fletcher Hamilton (Ciaran Hinds), and young son, H.W. (Dillon Freasier, above right),
to take their chances in dusty Little Boston, a hardscrabble community
where the main excitement comes from the holy-roller church of
charismatic preacher Eli (Dano again), Paul’s pious twin brother.

Plainview has a knack for saying the things that he knows people
like to hear, talking about the schools, fresh bread and milk, and
other goods and services that Little Boston will accrue as a result of
their collective acquiescence for his development. An opportunist
himself, meanwhile, Eli wants assurances that his church will see its
proper share of the profits from the drilling. The rest of the film finds Plainview growing his business and grappling
with three major personal conundrums and crises — the sudden arrival of
a long-lost half-brother, Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor),
an oil well accident that costs his son H.W. a loss of his hearing, and
a continued, quiet clash of wills with Eli. As the oil wells raise
Plainview’s fortunes along with those of all around him, these
conflicts and others escalate, and the values of faith, community, hard
work and ambition are imperiled by the corruption and deception born of
“black gold.”

From its purposefully threatening title on down to the gleeful nastiness with which Plainview is imbued, There Will Be Blood
feels like the first work in which Anderson has come fully to peace
with the notion of evil in the world, or at least human wickedness and
wanton destruction. Plainview is, to put it politely, a real
son-of-a-bitch, and a man whose heart hardens further with each dollar
he earns. Anderson’s screenplay easily, and deservedly, draws comparisons to The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Citizen Kane,
by way of its setting and themes — the wild, every-man-for-himself
western edge of the early 20th century, and the manner in which the
movie assays masculinized competition and cresting paranoia. What
Anderson expertly conveys is a deceptive sense of epic scope. We
scarcely leave Planeview’s side, but, thanks to some economically
condensed head-butting with peers, paradoxically have a keen sense of
his place in the oil industry, and the industry’s burgeoning importance
to the country at large.

Similarly, There Will Be Blood’s engaging and effective
evocation of early film history, and silent film in particular, is
purposeful, willful — from the emphasis placed on cinematographer
Robert Elswit’s gorgeous, justly lauded images to the focus on an
isolated, increasingly paranoid central figure. Meanwhile, besting even Michael Mann’s Ali — which opened under the pleading, almost
mournful strains of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home To Me,” for seven
wordless minutes — Anderson’s movie opens with a 14-minute passage in
which no dialogue is spoken.

And yet, for all its superlative production design and just-so sense of order and construction, There Will Be Blood also suffers somewhat from a feeling of stifling self-consciousness. The
film holds one’s attention, it keeps an audience interested, at least,
but it also feels both airless and maybe just a little self-satisfied,
never more so than in its finale, which (over)reaches for profundity
via an act of arbitrary violence. To call the movie an intellectual sham would be an overstatement, and too harsh a critical rendering, but there is a same-note, single-dimensionality to There Will Be Blood,
an anemia aped by Radiohead guitarist’s Jonny Greenwood’s memorable score for the
film — a THX test of nervous string work (particularly the track “Henry
Plainview”) that, somewhat like the story as a whole, comes across as
an elongated act of precious deception.

Plainview and Eli circle one another — not really enemies per se,
but barely swallowed discontent bubbling in each of them — yet little
changes for either man. The audience watches, meanwhile, but doesn’t
deeply identify with either man, particularly once the film ducks
forward in time to 1927, when Plainview’s obsessive bitterness and
mistrust has calcified into performance-art-level theatricality, no
matter Day-Lewis’ mesmeric charm. The film could be read partially as an
allegory of false prophets — of preacher-politician-authority figures
who slyly trade in falsehoods, or talk out of one side of their mouth
while lining their coffers with private gain. But the character of Eli,
as well as Plainview’s conflict with him, isn’t really deeply sketched
out enough to support a sustained vindication of this reading.

There Will Be Blood is, it seems — first, foremost and
achingly so — a movie for cineastes, with less of a realized arc than
an ending designed to be written about. There are far greater sins, of
course, but this eminence front rings of false modesty… or perhaps just
a savvy bit of financial capital raising after all. Deftly played, Mr. Anderson, deftly played. For the full, original-source review, from Reelz, click here. (Paramount Vantage, R, 157 minutes)

Aliens vs Predator: Requiem is a quintessential example of modern-day, “because-we-can” studio
filmmaking — greenlit and indeed wholly conceived not to satisfy any particular
creative notions, but just to wring undiscriminating, genre-fan dollars from
characters for which the studio, in this case 20th Century Fox, already owns
the rights.

I perhaps can’t speak expertly to the movie’s placement
within the canon of the extended Alien
vs. Predator brand (e.g., the comics, novelizations and videogames), but as
a big screen hybrid of two touchstone, extraterrestrial-influenced action
franchises — highlights of which include Ridley Scott’s seminal work of science
fiction and horror, Alien; James
Cameron’s adrenalized masterpiece follow-up, Aliens; and John McTiernan’s 1987, thrill-of-the-hunt, tropic-set Predator, about an otherworldly warrior stalking
and getting stalked by the future governor of California — this wan exercise in
homage induces chiefly sighs. The title creatures are trotted out, blood is
spilt, and roughly an hour and a half later one is free to go on their way and
continue their day, unencumbered by anything as novel as a strong reaction to
the movie, one way or another.

The story unfolds over 24 hours in the small-sized, central Colorado
town of Gunnison, where a
Predator’s ship crash lands after an on-board fracas, and several Aliens
scamper away. Receiving a distress beacon, another Predator shows up to aide
his comrade and track down the offending creatures. Naturally, this means very
bad things for pretty much the entire populace of Gunnison.
That includes Sheriff Eddie Morales (John Ortiz) and his old friend Dallas
(Steven Pasquale), back in town from a recent prison stint. Meanwhile, Dallas’
younger brother Ricky (Johnny Lewis, of the forthcoming One Missed Call) is caught up in a love triangle with high school
student Jesse (Kristen Hager) and her jerky jock boyfriend Dale (David Paetkau,
sneering enough to earn points as an honorary Busey). These characters
eventually cross paths with young mother Kelly (24’s Reiko Aylesworth), a returning soldier, and her 9-year-old
daughter Molly (Ariel Gade).

After a Predator/Alien battle blows out Gunnison’s
electricity and leaves the local power station in shambles, a National Guard
battalion is summoned — apparently operating under the Dominos Pizza dictum of
delivery, because they arrive in less than 30 minutes, only to get dutifully
slaughtered and conveniently bequeath their equipment to our main band of
survivors, who then quarrel about the best method of survival and/or escape.

The movie’s screenplay, by Shane Salerno, is full of generic and/or stilted dialogue, and the characters are
fairly thinly sketched. Ortiz is mightily ineffectual as Morales, and while
part of that is in the character (there’s supposed to be a fraternal power
struggle between he and Dallas), neither the film’s script nor direction is
smart enough to make full, interesting use of that, leaving him twisting in the
wind and audiences wondering how this guy came to be sheriff in the first
place. The script is no great shakes in terms of its narrative plotting either;
in lieu of fresh or imaginative staging, it evidences its… umm, “borrowed”
imagination through tangential set-ups to showcase no fewer than four
alien-bursting-through-stomach sequences.

Still, I suppose the movie serves as a successful mulligan
for 2004’s Antarctic-set Alien vs.
Predator in a couple important respects. Most notably, of course, is the
film’s rating, in line with the R-rated origins of its source franchises. This,
combined with a generally healthy sense of mayhem (e.g., kids in peril, plus
who dies and when) give the film a few moments of fleeting, pleasant, mild
surprise. The problem remains, however, that there’s nothing at all
nearly exceptional about Alien vs.
Predator: Requiem. It necessarily follows that a good bit of the movie’s
action is of somewhat murky design, given the difficulties of CGI rendering and
to-scale battle, but co-directors Colin and Greg Strause, visual effects
supervisors making their respective feature film directorial debuts, muck up
most of even the cheapest thrills of catharsis. There’s still a residual sheen of affection for the best
moments of each of these franchises that makes the excitement of seeing them in
action again tickle the cortex a bit. But there’s no compelling story here and
no top-shelf, bravura execution, so why shell out extra money for nostalgia’s
sake when your own DVD player can provide the same kick? For the full, slightly expanded original review, from Reelz, click here. (20th Century Fox, R,
92 minutes)

A strong and similarly emotionally resonant follow-up to his
2002 debut behind the camera, Antwone
Fisher, Denzel Washington’s sophomore directorial effort is a familiarly
structured but extremely effective drama. Lacking pretense and guile, The Great Debaters tells the true story
of an African-American college debate team who overcomes racial prejudice to
string together an unprecedented number of victories and eventually compete
against the all-white, reigning national champion squad at Harvard.

Set in the 1930s, The Great Debaters unfolds in rural, small town Texas,
against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South. Melvin Tolson (Washington)
is a passionate rhetoric instructor at Wiley
College, an African-American
Methodist school with around 360 students. Competition for his debate team is
fierce, and a slot the previous year doesn’t guarantee selection for one of the
four coveted positions.

After holding spirited tryouts, Tolson selects a squad that
includes one returning member and three new faces. The first woman on the
debate team, Samantha Booke (Jurnee Smollett), is an aspiring lawyer. Fourteen-year-old
James Farmer, Jr. (Denzel Whitaker) is the exceedingly well-read and mannered
only son of renowned scholar and namesake father James Farmer, Sr. (Forest Whitaker, no relation), the dean of the Wiley faculty. Older, independent-minded
Henry Lowe (Nate Parker), meanwhile, is a fiercely intelligent playboy who
hasn’t previously had to yield to authority or structure.

Tolson schools his students in the finer points of
parliamentary-style debate, but also moonlights working to unionize migrant
farmers and sharecroppers, both black and white. These actions land him in
trouble with local authorities, who are desperate to keep down the working
class, and view his actions as socialist agitation. As the Wiley squad racks up
victory after victory against other black colleges, local and regional, Tolson
begins quietly soliciting invitations for a grander stage, even as various
fissures in the team threaten to tear them apart.

Washington’s work as a director feels in all the best senses
like an extension of the moral persuasiveness he has an actor — the ability to
convey gravitas or righteousness in affecting shorthand, but also the rationale
that motivates someone who commits bad acts, as in Training Day or American Gangster. Here virtue and uprightness are on the side of Tolson and his
pupils, and Washington pushes all
the right narrative levers with expert pressure and aplomb.

Writer Robert Eisele, a distinguished television scribe with
a long list of award-winning credits, crafts an engaging work with crisp
characterizations, and the movie has a nicely parallel real world application
of Tolson’s principles through his (secret, at first) advocacy work for migrant
farmhands. The script doesn’t shy away from the harsh racial realities of the
time period, but neither does it paint all of its characters in solely broad
strokes — either virtuous or despicable. A brutally corrupt and likely racist
sheriff succumbs to pragmatism, while Nate does things that hurt Samantha. If there’s an easily identifiable problem, it’s that the
screenplay too often gives the Wiley team the benefit of the more naturally persuasive
side of an argument in the debate sequence, a gambit that comes to feel like a
bit of a copout.

The solid performances, though — especially from the film’s
young men — hold one’s attention and certainly help mitigate this hitch. While
Smollett too often slips into a highly affected drawl, 17-year-old Denzel
Whitaker is a highly sympathetic figure, carrying himself with the wry smile of
an ever-curious adolescent. Slightly older, meanwhile, Parker (previously seen
in Pride) has brooding charisma and a
killer matinee smile, but a real emotional range as well; despite several
charged or emotional sequences, he saves natural tears for an interesting
scene, and it serves the movie wonderfully. Washington and the elder Whitaker, meanwhile, each deliver
strong supporting turns as authoritarian types bent on instilling discipline,
confidence and inspiration in a new generation. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (The Weinstein Company, PG-13, 125 minutes)

Not too long ago, Newsweek
did a story, part feature piece, part analytical, business-minded op-ed, in
which they identified Will Smith as the most powerful actor in Hollywood,
calling him “the $4 billion man,” in reference to the combined (rounded
slightly down) worldwide gross of his films. In an industry where an actor’s staying power is determined largely
by opening weekend numbers, Smith represents the surest bet out there — a bankable
star with pan-gender and pan-ethnic appeal, and testable experience in almost every
major genre: action-comedy, science-fiction thriller, romantic-comedy and drama.

His latest film, I Am Legend, represents Smith taking his big-time summer credibility (Independence Day, both Men in Black flicks, I, Robot) out for a test-drive spin
during the December-to-remember holiday season, which heretofore has been used
to showcase only his more overtly dramatic fare, inclusive of The Pursuit of Happyness, 2001’s Ali and 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation, an early crossover effort from director
Fred Schepisi and playwright John Guare.

Still, it’s not quite as strange a seasonal placement as it
seems at first blush. I Am Legend has
a science-fiction-inspired premise, and some very active and tense moments that
I suppose you could characterize as action scenes. But it’s also a very
expensive character study. To that end, despite its rich screen heritage (the
movie is the third adaptation of Richard Matheson’s original post-apocalyptic
story, which also birthed Vincent Price’s more forthrightly titled The Last Man on Earth and Charlton
Heston’s The Omega Man) and the fact
that over the past decade many different possible director-star iterations were
kicked about for an update, I Am Legend
is distinctively suited to Smith’s extremely likeable star wattage, very much not unlike
Tom Hanks’ turn in Cast Away (incidentally
a fellow holiday season release, in 2000). The uniqueness and extent to which
the film is a head trip solo show has marketers at Warner Bros. reaching deep
into their playbook, pulling out little-used gambits that sound and feel like
part of the star system of Hollywood of yesteryear. (Says one set of TV
trailers: “There are not enough words to describe the power of… I Am Legend”.)

Set in 2012, the film stars Smith as Robert Neville, a brilliant
soldier-scientist who, despite being present at “Ground Zero,” could not
contain a terribly lethal, human-engineered virus, the result of research work
to cure cancer. Somehow immune, Neville is now the last (wholly) human survivor
in what is left of New York City,
and maybe the entire world. For three years, Neville has faithfully sent out
daily radio messages, desperate to find any other survivors who might be out
there. He’s also continued research on mutant victims of the plague, vampiric
creatures who lurk in the shadows, watching Neville’s every move and waiting
for him to make a mistake. As mankind’s last hope, Neville is driven by only
one remaining mission: to find a way to reverse the effects of the virus using
his own immune blood. He knows, however, that he’s both outnumbered and running
out of time.

Directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine), I Am Legend makes ace usage of its
locale, an evacuated Manhattan.
Think of the eerie Tom Cruise/deserted Times Square sequence in Vanilla Sky and Cillian Murphy wandering
about a desolate London in 28 Days Later,
add them together and you have just about half of the total unforgettable
effectiveness of I Am Legend’s
expansive outdoor passages, which are both wondrous and downright eerie.

The jointly remarkable and unremarkable thing about the
movie, then (unremarkable in that it’s the best, most natural way to tell the
story, yet remarkable in that they actually got away with it in this day and
age) is the fashion in which this visual desolation and dereliction dovetails
and works so well with Smith’s superb work as the understandably stressed-out
Neville, who has only his dog for companionship. There are scenes in which we see that, in order to
psychologically cope with the complete destruction of humanity, Neville has set
up clothed mannequins (with whom he chats), and includes pedestrian rituals
such as going to the video store in his daily routine. For most of the movie it’s
not quite an Apocalypse Now-type
descent into madness — Neville sleeps in a bathtub with a shotgun, but also
recites Shrek from memory — yet a
little past halfway in, there’s a galvanizing scene which becomes even more chillingly
effective when you realize that your first instincts, of a trap being sprung on
Neville, are incorrect.

Without giving away twists of the final act, including two
bits which require a significant acquiescence to convenience, I Am Legend fits comfortably among a
spate of recent films — inclusive of dramas, thrillers, action pictures and
anxiety-infused comedies — which all can be boiled down, without much
difficulty, to an underlying theme: we
are lost. That’s the predominant American screen narrative of our
times, and it’s at the core of this engrossing apocalyptic drama about one man
trying to stave off human extinction and “light up the darkness,” as Bob Marley
sings on the CD to which he faithfully listens. Of course, for an audience, being lost with Will Smith helps
make that quest more than a little easier and palatable. He may soon yet be
“the $5 billion man.” For the full original review, from FilmStew, click here.

For nearly 50 years, in various incarnations on the small
screen and in other forms of media, lively chipmunks Alvin, Simon and Theodore have
been delighting young audiences around the world, wreaking havoc upon the house
and possessions of their caretaker, Dave Seville, and crooning in distinctively
high-pitched, three-part harmonies. From the moment they sprung into being, the
creative brainchild of singer/songwriter Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., the chipmunks’
catchy sound has been a strange yet consistent pop cultural mainstay. Now, a
colorful but uninspired CGI/live-action hybrid film of the same name seeks to capitalize
on that dormant franchise power.

After the tree that is their home gets cut down for a
Christmas decoration, three chipmunks — rascally, impetuous Alvin, bespectacled voice-of-conscience
Simon and tubby, friendly Theodore — take up residence with frustrated, aspirant
songwriter Dave Seville (Jason Lee). Dave’s life is a wreck; his girlfriend
Claire (Cameron Richardson) recently left him, and he’s struggling to come up
with a hit for his demanding agent, Ian (David Cross).

At first thrown for a loop when he finds the trio in his
house, Dave catches the chipmunks and tosses them out. He changes his tune,
however, when he discovers that Alvin and the gang can carry a tune of their
own, so he strikes a professional deal with them: he’ll write the music, and they’ll
sing for their supper. Soon, tangentially inspired by their unintentionally
destructive antics, Dave has that elusive hit song — a Christmas-themed ditty
that launches Alvin and the
Chipmunks into the pop stratosphere. As Ian peddles the perks of stardom to his
new clients, Dave labors to convince them that he has their best interests at
heart, and awakens to the notion of a new surrogate family.

Director Tim Hill (Muppets
from Space, Garfield: A Tail of Two
Kitties) delivers streamlined, inoffensive and unmemorable work — a movie
full of pat set-ups and close-ups. The script, cobbled together from drafts by The Simpsons veteran scribe Jon Vitti
and Will McRobb & Chris Viscardi, is a desultory affair that seems to conform
to the notion that children’s films don’t require quite as much creative heavy
lifting. Littered with wan jokes that seem like placeholders for future
revisions, the story seems chiefly constructed from a checklist of narrative
elements associated with the characters (toaster waffles, paper airplanes, a
remote control car), all designed to elicit Dave’s signature exhortation of
exasperation (“Alvvvvin!”).

There’s no explication of why the chipmunks sing, and while
Dave originally expresses understandable bewilderment that Alvin and the gang
can even talk, this isn’t addressed in the context of the group’s meteoric rise
up the pop music charts. The film instead relies on the convenience of zippy
montages here, which makes the notion that the audience then instantly turns on
the chipmunks when they’re revealed to have been lip-synching at a concert all
the more ridiculous. Musical bits, obviously a big part of the characters’ entire
appeal, give the movie a bit of fleeting pop here and there, but there also
seems a lot of wasted comedic opportunity in terms of the chipmunks’ nesting
and acclimation to their new human surroundings.

The film’s glossy CGI production value is decent and
certainly of a piece with the intended demographic — Alvin, Simon and Theodore
look suitably cuddly and appealing — yet also irrevocably hamstrung by problems
of consistency with regards to size and perspective. Sometimes the chipmunks
are the size of a coffee cup, sometimes as big as Dave’s head. Disney’s recent
hit Enchanted, which also featured a
talking chipmunk integrated with human characters, handles these issues with
much more grace and panache. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

Part gentle coming-of-age story, part whimsical animal
flick, The Water Horse: The Legend of the
Deep tells the story of a young Scottish boy who serves as both friend and
parent to a mysterious newborn creature that he eventually has to return to the
nearby Loch Ness. Mixing live action and CGI, and anchored by solid
performances, the film seems poised for deservedly decent holiday returns from core family
audiences.

Utilizing a modern-day flashback device to frame a story and
pitch us back to World War II, The Water
Horse unfolds in 1940s Scotland,
where young Angus MacMorrow (Alex Etel, above right) lives on a lake-set rural estate with
his older sister and mother Anne (Emily Watson), waiting on his father’s return
from the war. Not long after Angus finds a mysterious egg on the beach, troops
are billeted at his home, and Captain Thomas Hamilton (David Morrissey), a
blueblood soldier placed purposefully far from the frontlines, sets out to
impress discipline upon him.

Angus’ hatched discovery, though, proves to be a most
unusual creature — a pudgy, slug-like beast with expressive eyes, fins, a quick
chomp and a love of water. Angus deems him Crusoe and takes care of him, feeding
him potatoes and other odds and ends. But the loveable sea monster quickly
outgrows both trashcans and bathtubs, so Angus enlists the aid of handyman
Lewis Mowbray (Ben Chaplin, above left) to keep it a secret from both his mother and
Captain Hamilton. It soon becomes apparent that Crusoe is too big to live
anywhere but nearby Loch Ness, so Mowbray and Angus secret him away and set him
free. But with the army testing their equipment in preparation for a possible defense
against an attack by Nazi submarines, Crusoe’s future is anything but secure.

Despite being based on a book by Dick King-Smith, the same
author behind the source material for the hit movie Babe, The Water Horse curiously
isn’t exploiting that connection in its marketing. That fact, combined with a
lack of familiarity and/or cultural identification with the source material and
legend of Loch Ness, will likely help ding the movie’s chances for breakout Stateside
success. Still, director Jay Russell, who last helmed Ladder
49, showed his touch with fairytale whimsy in 2002’s Tuck Everlasting, and also has trustworthy experience in another
period piece tale of a boy and his pet via My
Dog Skip, both of which come in handy here. Also, owing to its roots as a 1990
children’s novel, The Water Horse has
a solidly sketched backdrop of setting, and Russell and his team convincingly
create the chaotic adult world around Angus, which makes his identification
with Crusoe more believable and affecting.

It certainly helps that Etel, so arresting in Danny Boyle’s Millions, is the perfect sort of child
actor to hang a film’s appeal on; gifted with expressive eyes and an inviting
countenance, he exudes naturalness and an easygoing sincerity. One feels the
swallowed pain of his separation from his father, and wants very much to
indulge this adventure with him.

If there are knocks on The
Water Horse, foremost among them would be that Crusoe’s growth comes in
discrete, awfully big spurts; one good meal seems to cause him to swell and
double in size. Practically, for a budget, it may not be feasible to show the
creature at 10 to 15 different sizes, but these huge jumps in bulk and
dimension are distracting, even though they’re often featured for comedic
effect. Certain segments, too, including a dog chasing Crusoe around, feature a
needlessly goosed-up, cartoonish sound mix, which is out of step with the rest
of the movie’s adherence to practicality.

Tech credits are nicely polished all around. Bringing Crusoe
to life, the visual effects teams of Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, who
previously oversaw the effects work for The
Lord of the Rings, King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia, craft a
seal-like creature that actually undergoes some noted facial maturation — no
small feat in CGI. Deep exteriors and beautiful vistas of a mostly on-location New
Zealand shoot (Scotland
provides key exteriors for the MacMorrow’s estate grounds) are nicely
contrasted with cluttered interiors by cinematographer Oliver Stapleton. Composer James Newton
Howard’s swirling score, meanwhile, gives the movie a nicely proportioned sense of
emotional uplift, hampered only by some desultory work in the aforementioned
dog chase sequences. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

Spanning two-plus decades and a couple continents, director
Marc Forster’s adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner tells a culturally specific émigré’s tale
that still manages to locate the universality of the long shadow of adolescent
trauma.

Unfolding in flashback fashion, the story covers three discrete
time periods. In 1978 Afghanistan,
12-year-old Amir’s friendship with Hassan, the son of his father’s most
faithful servant, dissolves in the wake of an act of ethnically-motivated
violence and the shameful silence that follows. A decade later, after relocating
to California following the
Soviet invasion, the now adult Amir (Khalid Abdalla, above left), an aspiring writer, meets
and marries Soraya (Atossa Leoni), the daughter of another Afghan expatriate, in
an old-fashioned courtship. Another decade on, Amir’s successful life is thrown
into disarray when he discovers that the now-deceased Hassan had a young son
(Ali Dinesh, above right) who is now an orphan. The still-guilt-ridden Amir travels to Kabul
in order to rescue the boy and bring him to America.

David Benioff’s script strips the movie of a first-person
narrator but otherwise artfully condenses a difficult tale, and Forster’s
direction is for the most part wonderfully understated; particularly affecting
are the film’s adolescent performances. The homestretch run of Amir’s visit to
war-torn Kabul offers up melodrama and some dubious twists, and the setting and
subdued nature of the material additionally make this film a tough sell beyond
the upscale lit-market crowd that made a bestseller out of Hosseini’s tome. Still,
if one submits to the quiet rhythms of this slightly overlong tale, there is certainly
some measure of reward to be found, particularly in a time when smart
cross-cultural audits are important as well as enriching. For the slightly redacted capsule review, from CityBeat, click here. (Paramount Classics/DreamWorks, 123 minutes, R)

Personality goes a long way in film. In fact, there have
over the decades been many movie stars who’ve leaned on their own inherent
individual personas far more than any tradecraft secrets for success. Guile and
changeability count for something, but so too does simply being comfortable in
one’s skin and having some small measure of charm or grace to share.

John Cusack is a wonderful case in point. Known for his intelligence,
sense of humor, slightly mannered delivery and yet still offbeat nature, he’s
crafted a damn fine career mainly in the shadows, playing wary unconventional
types with dry wit and, occasionally, drier ambition. Along the way, he’s
scrupulously avoided the tabloids. Hair slicked back, he’s also nursed a monochromatic
fashion sense (“the artist wears black”) born of his upbringing in the bosom of
the Chicago theater scene — where
he grew up, along with his siblings, on the fringe of the industry under the
tutelage of his actor-filmmaker father. Since then he’s parceled out just
enough dollops of conventionalized charisma to keep a loyal fan base
(particularly the women) hooked. While he hasn’t merely played the same
character over and over (movies like Max, Being
John Malkovich and Cradle
Will Rock are proof of that), Cusack has traded heartily on iterations
on a theme, leaning on an off-screen personality equal parts enigmatic and
genial.

In two movies this fall, though, Cusack has taken
significant strides away from the quietly easygoing, “Johnny Trenchcoat”
persona that has earned him his bread and butter — first in November’s Martian Child, still
in release in some areas, and now in writer-director
James C. Strouse’s Grace Is Gone,
which played in competition at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year,
and picked up the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. In the latter, Cusack is nearly
unrecognizable. Combing his hair forward in a conservative ’do, and sporting
owlish Aviator-style glasses that would have last passed for fashionable in
perhaps the first Bush administration (and only then in traditionalist circles),
Cusack plays Stanley Phillips, a father who must figure out a way to deliver
the news to his two daughters that their mother, a soldier serving in Iraq, has
been killed in action.

Although a loving father, Stanley
is unable to conform to the more affectionate role of maternal caregiver, and is
equally out of sorts away from home and his girls — conveyed in an early scene (above) where he sits
uncomfortably in a deep-set, plush chair at a support group meeting for
military spouses, avoiding sharing his feelings. The sudden news of his wife’s
death merely casts everything in starker detail. Desperate to delay telling the
children, he takes 12-year-old Heidi (Shélan O’Keefe) and 8-year-old Dawn
(Gracie Bednarczyk) on a spontaneous road trip to Enchanted Gardens, a Disney-esque theme park
in Florida. Along the way they stop off to visit the girls’ grandmother,
who isn’t home; instead, the trio crosses paths with Stanley’s
shiftless brother John (Alessandro Nivola, delivering some fine work), who has
significant disagreements with his brother about politics and life in general.
With their father abandoning his taskmaster ways, Heidi intuits something is
wrong, and eventually begins to figure out more of the specifics, but not
before one last day of sunshine for Stanley and the girls.

In the end, Grace Is Gone is a solid but
still somewhat flawed film, most notable for how it serves its star, and vice
versa. Part of the unwritten contract of a movie that centers around a
character who’s internalized all their emotions is that said character then
must be confronted with other characters aggravating and contradicting that
desire for quietude, and for just a bit too much of its brief running time Grace is Gone doesn’t present us
with front-burner interpersonal conflict. The movie’s ending, meanwhile, tells us how to feel rather
than showing us a moment it’s earned on its own.

What we have, then, is a curious case of a sort of “grief
peep show,” an episodic drama with a lot hidden in its middle. Still, with his too-short pants and understandably frazzled
countenance, Cusack delivers in this film something different than we’ve seen
from him before, or at least in a long, long time. Both the fact that Grace Is Gone picked up the
Audience Award at Sundance and was amongst the most hotly bid upon films
seeking out distribution at the festival are indicative of just how
much effectively poignant weight this sort of change-up from Cusack carries.
Pinning its inaugural Oscar season hopes on the movie, the Weinstein Company
hopes mainstream audiences feel the same. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Amy Adams announces herself as a viable new commercial
leading lady in Enchanted, a genial family
film which finds animated fairytale characters thrust into the real world. The
ironic tweaking of film conventions hit the fairytale subgenre in 2001 with Shrek, and has continued since in
animated fare Hoodwinked and Happily N’Ever After. Enchanted, however, extends the practice
into live action, and while the story at its core is essentially a familiar one,
it’s told with such pleasant aplomb, mixing in a few spry musical numbers, that
it leaves a smile on one’s face. The Disney brand, combined with warm word-of-mouth and
positive-leaning critical support, should give the film a leg up with family
audiences on 20th Century Fox’s Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.

Enchanted opens
with an eight-minute animated sequence in which the fetching, innocent Giselle
(Adams, above) wistfully sings of waiting for “True Love’s Kiss,” an appeal that is answered
by Prince Edward (James Marsden), an enthusiastic and amorous if somewhat dim
adventurer. In storybook fashion, the pair’s marriage is immediately set for
the next day. This worries Edward’s evil stepmother, Queen Narissa (Susan
Sarandon), who wants to keep all the power of the throne for herself, so she
dumps Giselle into a wishing well, which promptly deposits her in New York
City.

There Giselle meets single father Robert (Patrick Dempsey)
and his six-year-old daughter Morgan (Rachel Covey). They offer Giselle a place
to stay while she waits for Edward to come rescue her, an act of kindness that
complicates matters with Robert’s girlfriend Nancy (Idina Menzel). As Giselle’s
unflaggingly sunny optimism wears off on Robert and their friendship deepens,
he teaches her about quaint real-world courtship like “dating.” The queen, meanwhile, sends her smitten lackey, Nathaniel
(Timothy Spall), after the blithely unaware Edward, to prevent any rescue of his
bride-to-be. She provides Nathaniel with three poisoned apples and tasks him
with finishing off Giselle before eventually deciding to take matters into her
own hands.

Adams is a smart, supremely cozy fit
for the wide-eyed Giselle, and her performance is both radiant and engaging.
With her hair piled high, she appropriates animated fairy tale posture and body
movements, deploying the same sort of charismatic naivety that was at the core
of her Oscar-nominated performance in 2005’s indie flick Junebug. In an industry always on the lookout for leading ladies
innately likeable and yet still comedically adroit enough to topline romantic
comedy vehicles, Adams is a prime candidate for
promotion to the front of the line.

Written by Bill Kelly (Premonition),
the movie has just enough parallel adult grounding to serve the story (Robert
is a divorce attorney), and its oblique references give Enchanted an extra, winking dimension and shading without making it
seem at all bawdy. (Passing mention is made of “what boys want,” and after a
misunderstanding that ends with her on top of Robert, Giselle charmingly thinks
Nancy is upset because she believes
she and Robert… kissed.) There are a few plot holes, and certain conveniences
are leaned on hard, particularly in the movie’s finale, but Kelly also finds a
few amusing ways to contrast the two worlds, as when Giselle’s morning aria (“The
Working Song”) is answered by rats, roaches and other big city vermin, as
opposed to the woodland critters of the movie’s opening animated segment.

Tarzan co-director
Kevin Lima’s background in animation serves him well, as he helps the cast
remain true to the earnest theatricality characteristic of such films. He also
oversees, with seamless precision, a park-set sequence that evolves into a
full-fledged musical routine. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz’s collaboration, meanwhile,
provides some instantly hummable tunes that already have the familiar ring of
classics by the time of their end credits reprisal. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here.

Last year’s Stranger
Than Fiction, in which the world of Will Ferrell’s unimaginative,
fuddy-duddy accountant got turned upside down when he discovered he was the
serial fictional character of an English novelist set on finally killing him
off, drew mostly positive notices for screenwriter Zach Helm, in his feature
film debut. In Helm’s first foray behind the camera, it’s the world of Jason
Bateman’s unimaginative, fuddy-duddy accountant that gets turned upside down
when he’s drafted to bring into line the financial affairs of the 243-year-old
owner of a magical toy shop.

Mr. Magorium’s Wonder
Emporium simply plays like some meandering, bastard love child of Toys, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland.
Its twee, self-satisfied colorfulness outstripped only by its sloppy form and
thin characterizations, the film does the unthinkable — it delivers a boring
trip to the toy store, making one yearn for the rigid strictures of adulthood
over the unbridled imagination of adolescence.

Dustin Hoffman stars as Edward Magorium, a bushy-browed
oddball who lives with a zebra and is the proprietor of an extraordinary shop
which houses all manner of fantastical playthings. Children love it, obviously, especially the personable,
pint-sized Eric Applebaum (Zach Mills), an avid collector of hats who has no
friends, and hangs around like he’s Norm from Cheers. A couple centuries old, and for no other reason than he’s on
his last pair of shoes, Magorium decides it’s finally time to hand off the
reins to the store to his manager, Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman), a
23-year-old piano aficionado who feels adrift and listless. To that end,
Magorium begins planning for his chosen date of terminal exit by bringing in
Henry Weston (Bateman), a straight-laced accountant with a creativity deficit.
The store itself, meanwhile, doesn’t spark to Magorium’s departure, and starts
exhibiting signs of petulance and noncompliance, namely through a slow drain of
color and decreased whimsicality.

The film’s list of confounding elements is a long one. First
off, we don’t learn enough about Mr. Magorium to really identify with Molly’s
distress about his planned departure. Similarly, Molly’s own “crossroads moment” is puzzling (does
she really want to be a concert pianist, or are her musical noodlings merely a
generic creative placeholder for early-twentysomething ennui?) and young Eric
is an outcast only because the script dictates it. None of these characters are
particularly deeply sketched, and consequently we don’t feel any fire in their
decisions and dilemmas, or attachment to their plights.

Most damningly, though, apart from some of the production
design and sets, neither is Mr.
Magorium’s Wonder Emporium infused with enough of a sense of
wide-eyed wonderment to make one forget about all these pesky, nagging
questions of back story and such. It sounds downright silly to say about a film
like this that nothing makes sense, but the logic on display here is of
come-what-may lackadaisicalness. Even if Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — another movie about an arrested-development eccentric
seeking out an informal inheritor — felt a bit emotionally isolated, it at
least had an undeniable authorial authenticity. Helm’s leaden directorial touch
is so passive and yawningly uninvolved — it’s pure by-the-numbers cute and faux-magical — that you’d be hard-pressed to believe Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium
was written and directed by the same person. That said, its problems extend
from screen to page, and back again. (Walden Media/20th Century Fox, G, 96 minutes)
For the slightly longer full review, from Reelz, click here.

A superb performance by Frank Langella anchors the exceedingly literate, engrossing Starting Out in the Evening, a richly drawn and for the most part artfully understated portrait of an aged novelist struggling with the flickering flame of creativity’s muse.

the standard analogue man in an increasingly digital world. His books long out-of-print, Leonard doesn’t take a freelance gig writing advertising copy because he deems it an objectionable compromise; he instead pecks away at a novel he’s been working on for more than a decade, and enjoys get-togethers with his adult daughter, yoga instructor Ariel (Lili Taylor). Despite having suffered a heart attack the previous year, Leonard still doesn’t have much use for self-reflection until Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious grad student defined by an obscure hunger for self-definition, enters his life. Leonard’s early novels had an electrifying impact on Heather, and she now wants to use her thesis project to spur a rediscovery of his work.

At once shaken and emboldened by their challenging interview sessions, Leonard’s staid, respectful tolerance for Heather slowly melts into consideration. An indefinable and precarious intimacy develops between them, but the stars in Heather’s eyes dim when she slowly comes to the conclusion that Leonard is too closed-off from certain unacknowledged traumas of his past to ever again write a truly great book. This cooling coincides, meanwhile, with an unexpected turn in Ariel’s life when she rekindles a relationship with ex-boyfriend Casey (Adrian Lester), a matter that greatly worries Leonard given their differing priorities (she wants kids, Casey avowedly doesn’t) in life.

Langella is well known for his stage portrayals of larger-than-life characters — including Dracula and Sherlock Holmes, among others — but his perfectly modulated performance here is one of managed disappointment. Leonard is an emotionally imploded man, able, in his great intellect, to parse and justify his self-interested behaviors. In his stillness and the consistency of his proper actions (both in movement and diction), Langella captures the character’s regret in evocative fashion before the story even spells out the particulars.

Adapted by Fred Parnes and director Wagner from Brian Morton’s novel of the same name, Starting Out in the Evening is characterized by a great and involving sense of character detail; the movie grapples in an intellectually honest fashion with notions of aging, responsibility and reinvention, and how they intersect with creative fire. Through it all, Wagner (the 2005 Sundance entry The Talent Given Us) trades in an unfussy style that keeps the focus firmly on his characters. The one big knock on the movie is that it has such a strong sense of Leonard that Heather is a bit recklessly sketched. While intelligently written — she’s certainly no bubbled-headed ditz — the manner in which she, and the movie, eventually address the inevitable elephant in the room, the potential of romantic connection, rings false. Heather’s occasional lack of recognition at how others perceive her actions also seems implausible, and after a while, her pluck becomes a bit irksome. For the full original review, from Screen International, click here. (Roadside Attractions, PG-13, 111 minutes)

In addition to its requisite genre offerings, the fall is a
crowded marketplace for prestige pictures — mostly dramas and thrillers with
familiar faces, all making a play for little gold trophies. For every
occasional exception to the rule (The
Silence of the Lambs, which swept the top-shelf Oscar prizes in 1992 after
being released in February of the previous year), there is a harsh reminder
that releasing too soon can create a memory gap, and potentially cost studios
significant awards victories, and thus all the cachet that comes with it. Saving Private Ryan, for instance, released
in the summer months of 1998 and grossed over $200 million domestically, but
was perceived to have lost the battle for buzz, and thus the Best Picture
Academy Award, to a more traditional December entry, Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love.

studio executives, their publicity departments and
personal publicists alike are always looking for both innovative new strategies
and ways to copy approaches that have worked in the past. For their political
thriller Lions for Lambs, distributor
United Artists, looking to make a big splash since Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner
took over, need only cast their recollections back two years for a good idea.

James Mangold, a respected filmmaker who had never had a
real breakout hit to his credit — barely cracking the $50 million mark in
domestic gate with his previous release, the extremely marketable ensemble
thriller Identity — saw his Johnny
Cash biopic, Walk the Line, benefit
from a gala opening night presentation at the AFI Fest. Held annually in
November in Hollywood, and for the past several years at the attractive
ArcLight Theatre, the festival comes late in the calendar year, and with many
pictures having already debuted at Sundance, Cannes or Toronto, finds itself in
the position of looking for a few commercial touchstones to help anchor its
many other worthwhile international presentations, coffee talks, and
independent and documentary offerings.

Positioned just a week and change in advance of its national
opening, the red carpet walk for Walk the
Line’s premiere generated big, national entertainment news coverage from Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, USA
Today and the like. A $22 million opening weekend soon followed, and the
movie went on to gross just under $120 million domestically, play for over five
months, and pick up five Academy Award nominations, including a Best Actress
win for Reese Witherspoon.

While it’s hardly lacking for star power or embedded respectability,
Lions for Lambs looks to be following
the Walk the Line playbook. Directed
by Robert Redford, and starring him, Cruise and Meryl Streep, the movie saw its
North American premiere on November 1 in two theaters at the ArcLight, with a
simultaneous overflow presentation at the adjacent Cinerama Dome. Time will
tell if this strategy works as well for Lions
for Lambs as it did for Walk the Line,
but one thing appears certain: a new pre-release tactic for glossy Hollywood
dramas has emerged, one that has all the inherent advantages of being an
in-town production.

Lions for Lambs takes
place on three equally tense and emotional fronts, each with considerable
personal stakes. In a Congressional office, up-and-coming Republican Senator Jasper
Irving (Cruise), a possible presidential hopeful somewhere down the line, is
about to feed a bombshell scoop about a new war strategy in Afghanistan to a
probing, liberal-leaning TV journalist (Streep) as the two carry out a fierce,
cat-and-mouse game of wit, charm and evasion during an hour-long, one-on-one
interview. At a west coast university, meanwhile, a once idealistic professor,
Dr. Malley (Redford) confronts a privileged but blasé
student (Andrew Garfield) in danger of never fulfilling his enormous potential.
At the same time, across the globe, two of Dr. Malley’s former students, Army
enlistees Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Peña), lay bare the debates
and arguments of mentors and politicians in a stark fight for sheer survival,
the heart-wrenching consequences of which will reverberate through all of their
lives.

Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan — and perhaps joined by
Cruise as pittance for tying up his brother, Joe Carnahan, so long in Mission: Impossible III pre-production,
only to eventually part ways with him — Lions for Lambs is a movie that’s destined to be noted in two-thirds of all
reviews as “having it heart in the right place.” Alternately invigoratingly
topical and frustratingly didactic, the movie assays the flickering flame of
idealism with a contempt that’s ultimately less rousing than depressing.

There are several pieces of clip-worthy acting here,
particularly from Streep — both in her circuitous grappling with Cruise’s
character, and in a meeting with her editor after the fact, where she, in a
panicked but clear and shrewdly comprehensible fashion, asserts a hearty
apportioning of self-blame for the media’s complicity in spoon-feeding the
public the chirping rhetoric of an administration gone astray. And the film has
the courage to let its characters fully embrace their roles. There’s no
pussyfooting around the differences of opinion on display, and there’s no
resisting the clarion call truth of one of its essential themes: that troubled
times are a call to action.

Still, Lions for Lambs
is essentially a film as op-ed piece, and only the circling-jackals segment
between Cruise and Streep really catches fire in one’s imagination, pulling
them forward to the edge of their seat. The other strands — like this one
well-written in that they’re articulate and reasoned, no matter the
point-of-view being espoused — don’t have enough natural pull, and even though
things are eventually wrapped together, catharsis is forestalled in the name of
entreaty. And films that ask rather than tell elicit strange feelings indeed; to borrow a song title from the more cinematically fortunate Cash, this flick is a “Ragged Old Flag.” For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Oscar season can remind one a bit of a Rotary Club bake-off.
There, there’s generally a lot of talk about new recipes, and everyone
excitedly looks forward to trying something new and perhaps a bit exotic. Yet
when it comes time to hand out the blue ribbons, it’s often the most tried and
true recipes, or at least some slight iteration upon an old favorite, that
carries the day.

Awards voters have proven time and again their
love for epic-scale productions (Titanic, The Lord of the Rings: The
Return of the King… errr, The
English Patient?), and Oscar and Golden Globe history is littered
with easily identifiable trends, hence the annual entertainment editorials that
start trickling out about this time of year regarding actors and actresses gaining
weight, or playing “ugly” or disabled. More to the point, though, once a performer
scores their first nomination, it begets them extra opportunities, certainly,
but also just more looks from critics and audiences, meaning that the
nomination process becomes somewhat cyclical, with previous honorees typically
(if not undeservedly) getting more and more acclaim.

Reservation
Road, then, has many if not most of the basic ingredients of a
traditional Oscar bait film. It stars Joaquin Phoenix — twice nominated for an
Academy Award, most recently in 2006 for his turn as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line — and Mark
Ruffalo (above left), a habitual awards season flirter, and the winner of the Los Angeles Film Critics’ New Generation Award in 2000 for his performance in You Can Count on Me. Its
female lead is Jennifer Connelly, 2002’s Best Supporting Actress winner for her
role in A Beautiful Mind.
The second female lead? Mira Sorvino, 1996’s Best Supporting Actress winner for
her turn in Woody Allen’s Mighty
Aphrodite. The film is directed, meanwhile, by the respected
writer and filmmaker Terry George, himself twice Oscar nominated, and coming
off of a critical hit with important political overtones in the form of 2004’s Hotel Rwanda.

Then there’s the Oscar-bait subject matter itself — a
grief-saturated drama with plenty of big emotional scenes, the movie is adapted
from John Burnham Schwartz’s novel about the accidental death of a child, and
how the adults closest to the situation variously deal with the heartache,
anguish, misery and guilt. Reservation Road‘s main problem, diagnosed in macro fashion, is that the seams of its oh-so-cutely constructed Oscar inducement show a little too obviously; the film recalls, in its own tangential and component ways, Miramax’s
late-millennium run of Lasse Hallström movies (The Cider House Rules, Chocolat and The Shipping News), each progressively more treacly and inert than the one before it.

The movie’s score, from composer Mark Isham (A River Runs Through It, Quiz Show, Crash),
swells in all the appropriate places, but George’s direction and the
film’s script are so busy telling us what to feel — and when to feel it — that a certain contrarian resistance develops. Phoenix’s performance is the single real standout thing about Reservation Road,
which otherwise hits all the standard aggrieved dramatic beats in
elongated fashion, and lacks any satisfying, stalking thrill that would
qualify it as a cousin of Neil Jordan and Jodie Foster’s recent The Brave One.

So why the half-hearted sales job by distributor Focus Features? It’s
called playing the odds. After sticking a finger to the wind with
critics — both in advance of its bow and just after its limited release — plans to take the movie wider, and give it a deep and sustained
theatrical release across the country, were basically scrapped. Focus
also had Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and Pride & Prejudice director Joe Wright’s buzz-heavy Atonement
on their holiday season slate. With advance notices on each of those
films — and in particular the latter, considered an early Oscar
frontrunner — trending markedly better, it was easy for Focus to turn
its focus elsewhere, away from Reservation Road. For the slightly more fleshed out review and awards season assessment, from FilmStew, click here.

A full-on Vince Vaughn charm offensive gives loose-limbed holiday
tale Fred Claus its own successful,
charismatic personality and appeal. Re-teaming Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin and Vaughn for the third
time, the movie wraps Vaughn’s trademark quasi-improvisational runs of
passive-aggressive patter around two wan storylines — of fraternal tension and
Christmas under siege — making for a pleasant, form-fitted vehicle of
engagingly manic buoyance, if also one that pays inconsistent attention to its
own through lines.

Though he’s had many hits, Vaughn has yet to prove himself
as a stand-alone box office draw, and Fred
Claus represents the biggest challenge in that regard to date. Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up all opened to the tune of $30 million-plus, but had the advantage
of high-profile costars. While staffed with capable, recognizable supporting
players, Fred Claus is being sold on Vaughn’s
name alone. Still, a big opening for the movie seems guaranteed. The question is whether Warner
Bros. can make inroads with the same audience that made Will Ferrell’s Elf a PG-rated smash four years ago in the same frame; this will
depend on whether fans of Vaughn’s edgier fare return for encore servings.

Fred became the polar opposite: a
fast-talking, rakishly self-centered repo man whose daydream schemes and serial
absentmindedness leave his girlfriend, traffic cop Wanda (Rachel Weisz),
perpetually exasperated.

Needing a sum of cash to close on an investment deal, Fred
turns to impersonating a Salvation Army Santa Claus, which lands him in jail.
He then calls his brother. Nicholas agrees to help Fred on one condition: that he come to the
North Pole for a long-delayed visit, and “earn” the money he needs by helping
out in Santa’s workshop. Old fraternal tensions, mostly of the one-sided
variety, come bubbling to the surface, and matters are further put at risk when
stern “efficiency expert” Clyde Northcut (Kevin Spacey) arrives to audit
Nicholas’ enterprise, putting the future of the jolliest holiday of the
year in jeopardy.

Fred Claus works
first and foremost as a vehicle for Vaughn’s goosed-up, chatterbox patter; key
to the entire enterprise is an appreciation of the actor as verbose, besieged
and aggrieved. This means there’s little for Mama and in particular Papa Claus (Kathy
Bates and Trevor Peacock, respectively) to do, and there are a few laid-track
story strands that don’t bring much to the movie. The movie’s mandate is clearly broad appeal, which also
leads to the somewhat sigh-inducing inclusion of goosed-up, slide-scale sound
effects during a chase sequence involving multiple Santas. A couple of these impromptu
slapstick bits, like a snowball fight between Fred and Nick, don’t rise above the
level of distractible interjections, but others (a finger-snapping dance
montage set to “Rubberneckin’”) get one’s blood pumping even though their
narrative inessentiality is completely transparent.

Instead of answering genuine questions born of the narrative
(Are the Claus family immortal, and if so how would that affect Fred’s
relationship with Wanda? Exactly who has discretionary approval over Christmas?),
Dan Fogelman’s script wastes an awful lot of time dawdling on petty, and less
interesting, matters. Still, there are also some genuine and pleasant surprises
in the narrative, including a “Siblings Anonymous” meeting with cameos from the
brothers of Sylvester Stallone, Alec Baldwin and former President Bill Clinton. In case there were still doubts, meanwhile, Dobkin proves himself a
gifted, intuitive comedic director. Even if one has qualms with the story
choices, it’s easy to recognize the effective manner in which he stages a scene
and draws out naturalistic performances and reactions.

Vaughn, as previously mentioned, is innately charming, a
fact of which Fred Claus serves as
the umpteenth example. Always a savvy professional, Giamatti injects a few
small, smart notes of stress and vexation into his performance as the
beleaguered Nicholas. Other actors aren’t given as much to do, though Spacey
does subtly channel some Lex Luthor villainy, all of which pays off in a scene
that amusingly touches on Superman. The film also makes hearty use of motion capture digital head
replacement, in similar fashion to the Wayans brothers’ movie Little Man. While not without its
occasional seams, visual effects supervisor Alex Bicknell’s work with John
Michael Higgins and Chris “Ludacris” Bridges — the former as Santa’s
second-in-command, the latter as an elf workshop deejay — will surely delight
younger viewers. For the complete original review, from Screen International, click here.

Femme-centric Korean thriller 7 Days, not to be confused with the recent Mexican film of the same translation, presents an intriguing if slightly overlong mixture of the crime
and procedural genres, with a very personally motivated ticking-clock element
thrown in for good measure. While trading in a bit of grisly imagery, the film
for the most part eschews the gore of recent like-minded films about a killer’s
manipulations, and doesn’t embrace the supernatural elements of contemporary
Korean thrillers like Arang, Silk and Apartment 1303 either. Instead, 7 Days sticks to grim, human-fueled
mayhem and panicked investigative maneuverings, bogging down a bit in the
second act before saving itself with a big, enormously satisfying hook in its
final reel.

hyper-charged design, slick commercial moves and end twist. Key to the
film’s much more modest chances overseas — either theatrically, with urban crime
pic fans who picked up on OldBoy’s
scent, or more likely on DVD, where Asian imports have carved out a nice niche
— will be its efforts to try to capitalize on the burgeoning recognizability of
front-and-center star Yunjin Kim (above), an integral cast member on ABC’s hit show Lost.

Single mother Jiyeon Lee (Kim) is a brilliant and successful
attorney who’s never lost a case. After her latest victory, her 8-year-old daughter
Eunyoung is kidnapped from a mother-child relay race at school. In lieu of
ransom, the kidnapper phones Jiyeon and instructs her that he wants her to legally
represent, and free from prison a drug peddler and habitual sexual offender, the accused in a heinous rape and murder case — a
trial coming up for capital punishment in less than a week. With her daughter convincingly threatened harm if she goes
to the police, Jiyeon throws herself into the case. For assistance she relies only
on old friend Sung-yeol Kim (Hee-soon Park), an independent-minded cop under internal
investigation for his own appetite for excesses, and even then doesn’t tell him
the entire truth. Jiyeon at first suspects a willfully botched
investigation or police cover-up, but then focuses in on a club-scene drug addict who seems to have suffered a psychotic split,
but nonetheless may have an important connection to the deceased. Meanwhile, Jiyeon sees her own despondency
paralleled by Sooki Han (Misook Kim), the mother of the victim, and works desperately
to please her daughter’s kidnapper and thus keep alive hope for her safe
return.

Ignoring the somewhat necessary absurdity of its
halfheartedly explained accelerated legal timeline — something the thriller Fracture, starring Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins, also recently deployed — 7 Days packs a breathless amount of investigative findings and head
feints into its two-hour running time. There at first glance seem a few too
many red herrings and/or loose, extraneous threads — including a bitter
prosecutor aiming for professional payback against Jiyeon, a party promoter
involved in a car accident on the night of the murder, and the reemergence of a
gangster acquitted by Jiyeon — but 7 Days
eventually winds its way to a conclusion of some shared complicity, so the vast
sprawl of its story is somewhat mitigated.

The chief problem is that the movie’s meticulously chaotic shooting
and editing style works against this expansive tapestry for a decent portion of
its middle, with willful freneticism obscuring key narrative details. Director Won Shin-Yeon and cinematographer Young-Hwan Choi give 7 Days a very modern, shimmering,
kinetic feeling — albeit too frequently also a somewhat juvenile restless one. They
seemingly draw inspiration from both small screen American serials like CSI and Cold Case and the quick-cut, quasi-impressionistic style of director
Michael Bay,
using crime scenes and car chases alike as an excuse to showcase flashes of the
same setting from all sorts of angles. These
modes of storytelling have the damning paradoxical effect of making 7 Days drag and seem longer, especially
in sequences with long dialogue exchanges. A more restrained focus on the
characters themselves would have increased the movie’s tension and intrigue.
For the slightly longer, original full review, from Screen International, click here.

Misguided narrative choices prevent Bee Movie, small screen king Jerry Seinfeld’s sociable freshman entry
into the animated fray, from fully taking flight. Spinning the story of a young
bee who discovers life outside of his hive and sues humankind over their
cooption of honey, the movie establishes an identifiable personality but
doesn’t carve out a deep and complicated enough setting or provide enough “wow”
moments to convincingly lay claim to a franchise identity.

Renée Zellweger) who saves his life, much to the consternation
of her boyfriend Ken (Patrick Warburton).

Breaking one of the cardinal rules of beedom, Barry talks to
Vanessa, and a friendship soon develops. Shocked to find out that anyone can
purchase honey right off the grocery store shelf (even actor Ray Liotta’s signature brand), Barry sets out to stop this
injustice — suing the human race for stealing the rewards of all the bees’ effort,
and locking antenna with a thickly-accented lawyer (John Goodman) representing
the honey lobby. Once the case is resolved, however, Barry finds both New
Hive City
and the world at large beset by unintended consequences, and together with
Vanessa he sets out to right matters.

Bee Movie’s
animation style is pleasant and uncluttered, most characterized by open spaces
and lockstep synchronicity that help define its hive as a model of efficiency.
Co-directors Simon J. Smith (Shrek 4-D) and Steve Hickner (The
Prince of Egypt) keep things moving at a crisp pace, and a few fantastic outdoor flight sequences, showcasing mirrored and
water-reflected perspective, give the film some much-needed thrill. The movie
also trades in the same sort of secondary visual jokes (“Frisbee hits hive —
internet out” reads one newspaper) that have helped make cross-generational
hits out of the Shrek films as well
as similarly densely packed Pixar efforts.

The difference here is that the story doesn’t exert any sustained
natural pull. It’s no surprise that Bee
Movie comes by its irreverence naturally, but the film’s biggest problems are
a lack of commitment to established story strands and no firm adherence to its
own interior logic. While there’s great attention given to specific jokes (one
recurrent strand involves bees’ recognition of magazine page-count, with the
thickness of Italian Vogue being recognized
as among the most dreaded improvised flyswatters), certain story choices (a
queen bee we never see, for instance, and a cross-country trip to the
Tournament of Roses parade) seem arbitrary at best and forced at worst.

Imaginativeness (clever but errant celeb cameos) and
convenience (the bees’ knowledge of humankind is intricate enough to file legal
paperwork, but not to recognize a tennis ball) combine to run amok over
cogency. In its third act, the movie’s flubs and miscalculations turn especially
egregious. A judge decides the outcome of Barry’s lawsuit in impromptu fashion,
ignoring a seated jury; Barry and Vanessa take over for an incapacitated flight
crew; and pollen instantly revives entire fields of dead flowers, like
sprinkled pixie dust.

Seinfeld injects some amusing signature notes of his own personality
into Barry, and Chris Rock, who previously proved his animated mettle in Madagascar,
provides some pop in his small role as mosquito Mooseblood, squeezing more genuine
laughs out of his two scenes than other minutes-long stretches. Other performers, however, fall prey to pendulum swings in
mood and tone; Warburton’s theatrical tendencies don’t quite match Ken’s beefcake
fatuousness, and Vanessa is confusingly in and out of Barry’s life, sometimes
helping him with the lawsuit, sometimes not, but always oblivious to its
consequences.
For the slightly longer full review, from Screen International, click here.

While many of the so-called “torture porn” films that it helped spawn — including this spring’s The Hills Have Eyes 2, which did less than half the business of its 2006 predecessor, and this summer’s Captivity, which couldn’t capitalize on controversy surrounding its advertising — have fallen on hard times, LionsGate’s Saw franchise as of yet shows no signs of surrendering its box office
relevance. The fourth installment, and the third in the series helmed
by Darren Lynn Bousman, opened this past week to bloody good returns,
pulling in just over $32 million on 4,600 screens, easily besting
fellow wide release Dan in Real Life. Less than a week into the release of Saw IV, the series has now scared up $450 million in theatrical receipts alone, not to mention spinning off various bestselling DVD iterations.

Tobin Bell) — more popularly known as Jigsaw, for his labyrinthine puzzles with human lives forever hanging in the balance — died at the end of Saw III, he still figures prominently in Saw IV.
The story finds a pair of FBI agents (Scott Patterson and Athena
Karkanis) searching for Jigsaw’s accomplice, which leads them to his
ex-wife Jill (Betsy Russell), who proffers clues to his past which help
further flesh out the motivations behind his homicidal inclinations. In
parallel fashion, meanwhile, as the investigation proceeds, SWAT
commander Rigg (series veteran Lyriq Bent) is kidnapped and forced to
participate in one of Jigsaw’s twisted games, opening up more questions and setting the scene for an inevitable fifth serving of squirm-inducing mayhem.

Saw IV represents the first film in which originating
actor-turned-producer Leigh Whannell does not have a hand in scripting
it as well. Screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, whom
dedicated Project Greenlight fans will remember as the young writers behind John Gulager’s Feast,
step into the series, and for the most part ably follow its prescribed
formula, much like a youngster trailing their parents’ footsteps
through a knee-high snow drift. Dividing the action between extended
flashbacks of Jigsaw’s pitiable past and elaborate present-day games
which require victims to try to think in order to stay alive, Saw IV’s
surprises aren’t as inventive as some of the other twists in the
series. But the sheer volume of its obfuscation (literally — the film
doesn’t cheat you on its sound mix) keeps things interesting for
diehard fans. Despite the clucking disapproval of the cinematic
intelligentsia, the Saw
films aren’t successful by accident. A well-oiled machine, the
franchise has consistently shown smarts about sticking with what
works about their movies, as well as a dedication to narrative invention. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Well acted if sweetly moralizing, Martian Child tells the
story of a science fiction writer who adopts an orphaned boy who claims to be
from Mars. Based on the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning short story by genre
luminary David Gerrold, the film is an extremely personable, smarter than
average family dramedy with just a pint-sized pinch of the is-he-or-isn’t-he
commotion of 2001’s K-Pax, which also centered around the claims of an alleged
extraterrestrial.

John Cusack)
is feeling some pressure from his nervous agent (Oliver Platt) to deliver a
sequel to a publisher desperate for their own “Harry Potter
in space.” David, though, finds his head elsewhere. Ignoring the
well-intentioned advice of his sister Liz (Joan Cusack), herself a mother of
two, David files paperwork to adopt Dennis (Bobby Coleman, above left), an almost
pathologically introverted youngster who keeps insisting he’s an alien.

Dennis — who applies slick layers of sunscreen to his skin,
and sports a “weight belt” ringed with batteries, all to keep himself
from drifting up and away, he explains — comes to live with David, and
rechristens his aging dog with the Martian name “Flomar.” David, along
with his friend Harlee (Amanda Peet), teaches Dennis baseball, and eases his
transition to school, all the while trying to strike a balance between
indulging Dennis’ quirks and slowly socializing him, drawing him out of his shell
of defensive construction.

Owing to its literary roots, Martian Child benefits from the
fact that all its characters are of above average intelligence, and thus
approach problems with at least a small degree of self-awareness. This means
many scenes can be played on several levels at one time. The movie tugs at
heartstrings, yes, but does so in a manner free from pretense or affectation. Perhaps deciding them too tough of a sell, the script
jettisons the source text’s autobiographical elements about a single gay man,
recasting David as a widower and playing up his own troubled, misfit adolescent
past. Despite the potential for disaster such a tweak invites, the changes are
handled not only convincingly but also artfully, since the alienation David
felt from his artistic inclinations, pre-career success, remains intact, informing
his adult personality.

The only big knock on the film — apart from an arguable schmaltz
factor — is that David’s professional pressures are less convincingly sketched.
That they recede into the background for so much of the film is fine until a
jarring reentry of slightly heightened tone involving Anjelica Huston’s
blustery publisher. That said, Menno Meyjes, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of
The Color Purple who first transitioned behind the camera with 2002’s Max, also
starring Cusack, has a fantastic touch with actors. He doesn’t lean too much on
Coleman, who delivers his lines in a prepubescent rasp, to play up Dennis’
quirks; for every bit of emoting, there’s a matching bit or two of guarded
silence or sparse exchange.

Cusack typically injects no small amount of caginess into
almost all his performances, but he eases up on that persona to an admirable and
pleasing degree here
. The fun interplay with his real-life sister, which
underpins a number of scenes, might well be expected, but Cusack has worked
with almost all of the other actors with whom he shares significant screen time
— Peet, Platt, Huston and Schiff — and that loose-limbed idiosyncrasy also helps give the movie a genuine
sense of rootedness. Then, of course, there’s the matter of Cusack’s chemistry
with Coleman. The pair has a low-key, very believable rapport that isn’t born
of endless patter. Martian Child embraces offbeatness and whimsy, recognizing the
importance of small actions, and for the most part artfully obscures its clichés with this tack.
For the full review, from Screen International, click here.