Do you wanna dance

Antepenultimate day of the aughts TS*3

But first . . . say what??? This from today's Times story about 2010 releases of films that have been in the can for a long time:

That slightly older films have clustered in the coming quarter also owes something to a frenzy of activity that preceded the three-month writers’ strike that began in late 2007. Studio executives stockpiled scripts, then quickly shot a spate of films that are still working their way through the system.

Green Zone was part of that surge, as were The Wolfman and Repo Men, a pair of 2008 movies set for release by Universal in the next few months.

Excuse me? Repo Man? How could one of my all-time favorite weird films be remade and I be completely unaware until reading a story about its been sitting around for two years waiting to be released? No, idiot; don't you read for a living? It says Repo Men, idiot, plural: sci-fi about repossession of artificial organs set for April release.

Oh. Anyway . . .

La Danse: Le Ballet de l'Opera de Paris

Crit

It's a baseball cliché that the human arm isn't designed to throw a ball 95mph or to impart such torque that the ball curves sharply on its 60-foot route. I've watched enough baseball that--while I'm still impressed, make no mistake--I no longer drop my jaw when I see what the human arm is capable of when it has been trained to ignore nature. I guess aficionados of the dance must get to that point, too, with the rest of the body.

Not me, though: carefully limiting myself to only as much ballet as appears in enthusiastically reviewed films, I am happy to remain in awe. But what does it say about one's day at the movies when by far the smartest script and the best dialogue come from an unscripted show-don't-tell Frederick Wiseman documentary?

The Young Victoria

Crit

Can I just go on record here as not being enchanted by Emily Blunt? She was bitchily fun in The Devil Wears Prada, but as the spunky young queen here, she's just a character in a soap opera unable to raise the project above its soapy dialogue.

Sherlock Holmes

Crit

Mishmash of Dan Brown and Harry Potter; depend on Holmes to dispel the nonsense. Fisticuffs and explosions, no extra charge. Sequel promised. No. Just no.
*Temple Street

Trailers

• The Last Station--Movin' on up with the Tolstoys! A. O. Scott hated it, David Denby and most critics loved it. I guess I'm in.
• Cop Out--Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan in the early front-runner for the worst film of 2010. Shit! It's directed (but not written) by Kevin Smith!
• The Bounty Hunter--Oops! Cop Out's lead didn't last long!
• Inception--Seems very Matrixy.
• Clash of the Titans--Holy Harryhausen! What to think about a CGI remake of one of the great cheesy F/X flicks of all time? next? Jason and the Argonauts: The Kingdom of Hades? Oh, yeah, I guess so.

Thanks for the barbecue

Second-day-of-Kwanzaa M4

OK, mark this date on your calendar, because today I am a happy man, filled with warmth, nay, almost love, for my fellow humans. Mostly the filmmaking humans, granted, but still--there's some serious spillover. This is as warm and as fuzzy as I get.

Partly because these were four of the best movies I've seen all year, partly because only one can even arguably (and I would. Argue otherwise, i.e.) be termed a sad-bastard movie, partly, perhaps, because it had just been so damned long since I'd M'd and I guess I didn't fully appreciate how much I'd missed it--I don't know, but the day was just so freakin' much fun, you know? Like just nearly 100 percent good times? (There were those two separate people who bitched at 3 separate people/twosomes for sitting in front of them, but while I did want to ask why we can't all just get along, I let go of it as soon as the enchanting film began.)

And the funny thing is, the weather was so unexpectedly gorgeous--sunny, temps in the 50s, I'm sure--that I was tempted to blow off at least one flick and finally haul my ass to the High Line. I might have done had it not been--what, 9, 10 months since my last Manhattan movie excessathon? Since before baseball season, anyway. Thank god I didn't waste any extra time outside! Because:

Ricky

IFC

In the inevitable American remake, there will be lots more madcap Ricky-flying adventures, in CGI--it'll be set in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or some other city chockablock with landmarks for Ricky to fly over and around and through (here I'm thinking St. Louis), and it won't be nearly as good because it won't be as much (or as real) about the effects on the rest of the family of having a flying baby in the house. And there won't be this weird, subtle sense that the whole story is from the older sister's perspective, that she somehow invented or is responsible for her baby brother's wings.

But speaking of unexpected wings, the part of the building that used to hold a coffee shop is now screens 4 and 5, the latter of which is where this showed: 20-odd seats, DVD projection, I believe--seats and layout comparable to screen 3 upstairs, otherwise comparable to screens 8 and 9 back home.

Politist adjectiv (Police, adjective)

IFC

In the American version of this . . . oh, forget it: there could never be an American version of this. Or, rather, every police procedural is the American version of this, except that the two versions show almost none of the same stuff. Here we get the godawful tedium of a pursuit and stakeout, and your mind wanders, and you think, mustn't the cop's mind wander too? And we get frustration with the bureaucracy--OK, there's a little overlap there, but remember, this is a bureaucracy sired by Stalin (I guess I should mention that it's Romanian).

Mainly we get the conflict between the letter of the law and conscience, and if that comes up sometimes in the American police procedural, when have we ever tried to resolve it with a dialectical exercise based on dictionary definitions? And when I say that the grammar and usage bits are among the highlights, and say, moreover, that I mean that as praise . . . well, have I ever steered you wrong?

Panique au village (A town called panic)

FF

Holy fucking shit--this is one of the trippiest movies ever. Take the manic disregard for comic restraint of early Pee Wee Herman, an animation idiom influenced by the Mr. Bill shorts from early Saturday Night Live, logic straight from Dada, and a touch of SpongeBob undersea décor.

Plot: three toys--Horse, Cowboy, and Indian--share a house as best friends. (No, it's not like that. No, really. Well, yeah, Cowboy and Indian share a bedroom, but in twin beds--and Horse has the major hots for Madame Longrée, the red-maned music teacher.) C & I, having forgotten H's birthday, order 50 bricks online to build him a barbecue--except that the zero key accidentally gets held down and they order 50 gazillion-dillion-momillion bricks. Then, after that, things start getting strange. Like with weird submarine bat kinda creature things.

OK, look: I haven't inhaled in . . . well, I don't know how long, but that's purely a function of age, not of having inhaled at an interval any nondamaged brain would be able to keep track of. But jesus! If you were gonna inhale, if you were gonna inhale before a movie, this would be the one.

By the way, JT--did the online brick vendor not put you in mind of Towelie?

Sita Sings the Blues

IFC

OK, if my blown-away threshold had not just been blown to the sky before this, this would have blown me away. As it was, it merely awed me: ballsy autobiographical breakup journal-cum-Indian tale of Ramayana-cum kickass introduction to the kickass '20s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw (I know, right?). Gorgeous look, gorgeous sound (even when Hanshaw's not singing).

What makes the Indian stuff great (that's Slurpee Indian, not casino Indian, as in Panique) (he pauses; he wonders, Is there any chance anyone reading this will think I'm really . . . oh, fuck it) is the interplay of 3 talking heads discussing (1) textual variants in the myth and (2) problems with myth logic and especially with myth vis-à-vis modern consciousness, especially but not exclusively feminist consciousness. Which are (2, i.e.) many and varied.

And filmmaker Nina Paley (who, according to Leal Elementary School graduate JT, is a Leal Elementary School graduate [the one in Urbana, Ill., not the one in Cerritos, Calif.]) bravely sets her own distinctly unfeminist reaction to rejection in parallel to Sita's, which ends up redeeming her sorry situation.

Trailers

• Hausu (House)--Billed as the "first horror/fantasy film"; hard to tell which of the risible bits are supposed to make us laugh.
• Chugyeogja (The Chaser)--Oddly, this plugs itself by pointing out that it is being Americanized by the makers of The Departed--which you would think means Scorsese, no?
• A Film with Me in It--Wacky Brits, accidental gory deaths.
• Fish Tank--Creepy stepfather/stepdaughter sex, looks like.
• Auf der Suche nach dem Gedächtnis (In search of memory)--Autobiography of Eric Kandel.
• Garbage Dreams--Poor kids in Cairo.
• Sweetgrass--Sheep!
• Pranzo di ferragosto (Mid-August lunch)--Wacky old Italians.
  
• Das weisse Band: Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The white ribbon)--Michael Haneke's latest, getting tons of buzz.
  

Wouldn't it be nice if we were . . . uh, let's not go there

It's Complicated

Crit

Excuse me a minute--I have to do this right now before I forget, being, after all, a man of a certain age . . . yes, OK, Gabby Adler, daughter of Jake (Alec Baldwin) and Jane (Meryl Streep), is played by Zoe Kazan, whom I have indeed just seen, as the fiction-writing ingenue in Me and Orson Welles.

OK, now that I've taken care of that, let's fill out the scorecard for this tale of December-December romance: the stars are 4+ years younger than I (Baldwin, though his character is 2 years older), 4+ years older (Streep), and 8+ years older (Steve Martin). Gee, I guess it's not as bad as I thought.

As for the film itself, Manohla Dargis singlehandedly overcame my Nancy Meyers skepticism, and I am grateful to both of them, as well as to everyone named above. The dramatic parts ring true if not, for the most part, original, but the comic parts of this are absolutely hilarious, except when Meyers relies, as it seems she must at least once in every film, on some bit of half-assed completely out of place plotting. Baldwin plays . . . well, he plays the only character he has been playing since 30 Rock began, the profoundly self-unaware amoralist, and I for one have no problem with that. And there's a smile Martin scrunches his face into at one point when his character is stoned (it's complicated) that you'd swear was drawn by a caricaturist. Why, hell, I even liked John Krasinski's character and found him funny, which may be a first.

Trailers

• Valentine's Day--Another of those zillion-star romcom omnibuses. Omnibi?
• Robin Hood--Wow, didn't know about this! Ridley Scott directs Russell Crowe, and Maid Marian is . . . Cate Blanchett! Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.
• Leap Year--Hmmm, two February sort-of-holiday movies that I'll wager will not displace the best such ever. This looks probably awful, unless Amy Adams and Matthew Goode can save it.
  

Director's cut

Los abrazos rotos (Broken embraces)

Crit

Ah, nothing says Christmas like the latest Almodóvar. There's nothing particularly new here--love, obsession, betrayal, make-believe, movies--but then Mozart used the same dozen notes over and over again, didn't he?

An odd, twisty plot that ultimately makes sense, if it isn't ever really as convincing as it is satisfying.

Penélope Cruz--aka "that little troll," per JGK, who should be grateful that I disguise him behind initials, though he may be getting a little tired of having me mention this every time I mention her--continues to earn A's in Almodóvar's films, having gradually worked her way up to the B+/A- level in English-language ones. And if this is what a troll looks like, where do I get my green card?

Trailer

• Un prophète--Arab boy makes good in French prison.
  

Your backpack

Up in the Air

Crit

Surprised not to see an end-credits thank-you to Alexander Payne for permission to use Omaha geographically and thematically. It is a Payneful film indeed, and a painful one, easily the best and most grownup of Jason Reitman's 3 films to date. Like Payne, Reitman takes us in a direction that seems to forecast one conclusion, then plays it much smarter, and much more true to life. I actually wish I hadn't encountered hints about that reversal (and so have already done you a disservice if you hadn't yet encountered same), because I suspect the surprise would have hit me with all the force with which it hits George Clooney's Ryan Bingham.
A film for recessionary times economic and emotional.

Trailers

• The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus--How can I not have seen a trailer of this before? Looks trippy, but the buzz is not promising.
• Remember Me--Father/son, father/daughter story.

Two narratives diverged on the Brooklyn Bridge

Uncertainty

Crit

In principle, this is invigoratingly adventurous filmmaking. In practice, it's hard not to wonder which of the many ambiguities are just sloppiness.

We begin in media ponti, where Bobby (the always excellent Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Kate (the less so Lynn Collins) face a Big Decision. Having said that he's fine with either choice (and thus, crucially, establishing it as an A/B proposition), Bobby tosses a coin. They look at the result and go tearing off in opposite directions, and, as it turns out, into distinct (and, formally if not literally, mutually exclusively) stories, one set in Manhattan, the other in Brooklyn and Queens--but both characters are in each, and their relationship is the same.

But what is the choice? Well, in the Long Island story (Green--an ingenious and useful color coding helps the viewer always know immediately which story he's in), the answer is simple: abortion or baby? And the Green narrative follows an arc we've seen often, and one, moreover, that most of us are familiar with in life, secondhand if not first-.

But in the Manhattan story (Yellow), I'm not really sure. Is it what to do with the Trio they find in a cab at the start? That's certainly the question that occupies them, and the possibilities are potentially rewarding but also life-threatening. But that's not a coin-toss A/B proposition, not by a long shot. Moreover, it doesn't lend itself to the calm contemplation of the opening scene, as the pregnancy issue does. So is it the same pregnancy question in Manhattan, and the risks and rewards of the found Trio simply a fantastic approach to answering it?

Seems doubtful, for aside from there never being any direct mention of it, as there eventually are in Green, there's a lot of action-movie-ish running and jumping that you would think would elicit a nod to her delicate condition if her condition were delicate. So how the hell does that story work, vis-à-vis the more real-life-conventional one?

Not that that question necessarily has to be answered. But in a film that seems to be implying a well-wrought if somewhat warped symmetry--an A/B coin flip--you can't help but wonder whether you're just too dim to get it. And there's another major asymmetry of setting at the end that seems just wrong as well.

An interesting film, and clearly a thought-provoking one, but I have a sneaking suspicion there's less to it than meets the eye.

King of another world

Avatar

Post

Gee whiz, there can hardly be any question about James Cameron being an asshole, right? I mean, if you have any doubt, just read this. And so logically I would expect film critics, who are, after all, human underneath it all, to look for any chance to rip him a critical new one. So when he has a half-billion-dollar special effects movie, I'm looking for a serious this-is-shitstorm.
I'm certainly not looking for a 30-for-32 score from Top Critics at Rotten Tomatoes. I mean, that says to me that they just can't help loving it. And now I know why.
It's Lord of the Rings, it's every cowboys-and-Indians movie, it's Zululand, it's Vietnam, it's Iraq, it's Star Wars, it's Apocalypse Now--and it's also as original as a sci-fi movie can be in the post-science-fact era. It's feminist, it's ecopolemic, it's anti-imperial, it's the best impulses of John Ford and Francis Coppola and Oliver Stone--Christ, what is it not?
Oh, and did I mention that it's one of the most gorgeous fucking films I've ever seen--or that the alien race Cameron has invented is the most gorgeous alien race ever invented for the pictures? Did I mention that his new 3D technology may or may not reinvent the medium, but his use of it it the most exciting 3D I've ever seen, if only for the tiny details: flying insects in the foreground, e.g.?
A-fucking-mazing.

Invictus

Post

Unfair to have seen this right after the soulfuck of Avatar, and in retrospect unfair to see it right after reading the book it was based on, John Carlin's Playing the Enemy. We've seen far too many fantastic, unbelievable, inspirational stories in the movies for this to be the proper medium for a fantastic, unbelievable, inspirational story that happens to be true. If you've read the book, you know that there are in fact important elements downplayed in the film, probably because they're just such feel-good clichés--the embrace by the mostly Afrikaner Springboks of the new Xhosa national anthem, e.g., or the symbolic force of Mandela's appearing before the championship game in the green and gold jersey.

Lest I mislead you, this is a fine movie, and the inevitability of Morgan Freeman's playing Mandela is well requited. But this is one story best told on the page. See the movie, but read the book too.

Trailers

• The Book of Eli--Denzel, postapocalypse; that's a pretty good start.
• Kick-Ass--Teenage superhero wannabes.
• Knight & Day--Cruise and Diaz in another one of those action-fish-out-of-water pics (cf. From Paris with Love) must have seemed like a good idea to somebody.
• Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief--21st-century teen demigods; oh boy.
• Alice in Wonderland--Hadn't seen the 3D trailer before, and I gotta say: seems more magical this way.
• Shrek Forever After--Actually called The Final Chapter or some such in the trailer: definitely promises to be the end of the sage, thank god.
• Extraordinary Measures--Weepy.
• Green Zone--Bourne, but without the amnesia.
• Why Did I Get Married Too--Actually, that's Tyler Perry's WDIGWT; need I say more?
• Edge of Darkness--What do you suppose happens when a widower ex-cop played by Mel Gibson loses his daughter to an assassin's bullet meant for him?

Boy, genius

Me and Orson Welles

Crit

Hated "Me," loved (while hating) OW. Put another way, there is an excellent movie here about the birth of the Mercury Theater and about its mad mother-father-god and about the mere mortals in that god's thrall. And then there's a soggy, cliché-ridden coming-of-age story that the interesting story revolves around: about the callow boy whipped into a maelstrom of forces beyond his ken, the theater, betrayal, love. I mean, come on: what's the point of Zac Efron being at the center of any story not aimed at 13-year-olds?

The unknowns Christian McKay and James Tupper are convincing as Welles and Jo Cotten, though Eddie Marsan, always terrific in Eddie Marsanish roles, is just far too Eddie Marsan to be a believable John Houseman--when he goes for haughty indignity, he rises only as far as petulance.

Another splendid performance by Claire Danes, who, would you believe, turned 30 this year and actually has if not lines at least creases in her face that finally prove she's no longer a teenager? In fact, her perpetual teen status beautifully offsets her role here as the sharkishly ambitious faux-ingenue who devours the genuinely ingenuous Efron character. It is really time for her to get an honest-to-god movie-carrying, larger-than-life role.

Oh, one more thing: wonderful soundtrack, and a generally fine job of putting us in 1937.

No more unnecessary jumps

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Crit

Golly, this is one weird, hilarious Werner Herzog film. How weird? Well, Nic Cage apparently was given over-the-top carte blanche, yet if anything, his performance is a tad too restrained for the film. Just a tad.

Cage, like Harvey Keitel in the original, plays, well, a bad lieutenant, one not altogether bereft of a moral code, but one who has higher priorities than right behavior, mainly cadging heroin and cocaine from the precinct evidence room. The scene with the clearest parallel in Bad Lieutenant, a power-play shakedown of callow upper-class party kids, may be even creepier than its analogue, and that, as my friend who grew up just a few crack-vials' throws from New Orleans would say, is tall cotton.

There is one critical difference between that film and this one, and I'm not talking about the iguana hallucinations. (To be clear: that's hallucinations by a human of iguanas that aren't there, not hallucinations by iguanas.) But if I told you what the critical difference is, then I'd have to, I don't know, plant evidence with your DNA on it at a murder scene or something. Just see the damn movie. Maybe get high first.

Oh, but not so high that you can't answer this quiz question afterward: what obvious error occurs in the presentation of Terry's climactic sports bet (with a bookie played by the always-good-to-see Brad Dourif, by the way)? (Answer below in invisible ink.)

Terry has fixed the star running back for "Louisiana," the nonexistent university to which the cop is devoted, to make sure his team doesn't cover a 6-point spread. That makes sense if Terry is going to bet on Texas in the game, but in fact, when he lays down the bet, he clearly tells his bookie "on Louisiana." I thought maybe it was supposed to be his error, which would have a payoff later when he wins a bet he thought he'd lost, or vice versa, and though he does indeed win a bet he thought he'd lost, that's not why, and he is paid off as if he had bet against Louisiana. Oops.

Sam I am not

Brothers

Crit

Funny what feelings films inspire. This one gave me a thought I don't remember having before: that it is really a good thing that I have only one child, because I am a born comparer, a born weigher, and if I'd had two children, how would I have avoided making one feel second-best?

Yes, the original was an amazing film, but this one stands up quite nicely, thank you, with moving, convincing performances across the board, the most surprising by 10-year-old Bailee Madison. The one performance that isn't quite what it might be is the location: in the original, dark, cold Denmark is a character in its own right, making the sads sadder and the scaries scarier. Here the locale is Minnesota, inexplicably played by New Mexico, which sometimes feels a bit like a stunt double.

Trailers

• Season of the Witch--Huh--who'da thunk: Nic Cage in a schlockfest!
• Crazy Heart--Lotsa Oscar buzz for Jeff Bridges, but the trailer looks pretty déjà vu.
• Greenberg--Noah Baumbach directs his own script (w/ a story contribution by Jennifer Jason Leigh) about a 40ish slacker (Ben Stiller). In other words, hell, yeah!
• From Paris with Love--Is it just me, or does Travolta's skinhead look so huge that you think he must have a full head of hair under a cap? Anyway, brainless-looking action pic, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the in-over-his-head sidekick.
  

The shirt smelled of anger

The Messenger

Crit

Another good Iraq War film unlikely to be much seen. Woody Harrelson, god love him, pretty much just plays Woody Harrelson again, and some of the dialogue comes from the Army/Navy Surplus store, but Ben Foster shows some chops--particularly the ability to work effectively with silence--that we haven't seen before.

What the cuss?

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Crit

Step aside, The Royal Tenenbaums, there's a new favorite Wes Anderson film on the block.

As with Where the Wild Things Are, it's hard to know exactly who the audience is for this movie ostensibly but not really made for kids. But unlike the sad, sad, Wild Things, this is a cussin' laugh fest, even as it tackles issues well above the 8-year-old's pay grade. The stop-action animation is very good, but the long-shot tunneling shots--a bit reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's Python stuff on the rare occasions he didn't overcook it--is just berserkly funny. Brilliant.

Trailers

• Tooth Fairy--Yes, I love Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, but this looks pretty disastrous, except perhaps when compared with . . .
• Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

True lies

The Yes Men Fix the World

Crit

My first thought when I discovered that these guys could continue to punk greedy corporations even after showing their faces a few years ago in The Yes Men was "Don't these corporate yahoos go to kneejerk liberal documentaries in the art houses?" Well, astonishing though it may seem, apparently they don't.

Dow, Halliburton, and HUD are the deserving punkees this time, and even the liberals' newsletter, aka the New York Times, gets a poke (motto atop fake front page: "All the news we hope to print"). Like the boys themselves (ostensibly real names Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno), I have little faith that they actually can fix even a little bit of the world, but I'm sure glad they're trying. And I'm glad that, like their stylistic godfather Michael Moore, they can make me laugh while doing it.

Bronson

Crit

Some men are born to violence, some men achieve violence, and some men have violence thrust upon them. Charlie Bronsen, né Mickey Peterson, is a bit of all three in Nicolas Winding Refn's beautifully loopy bash-o-pic of England's Most Famous/Violent Prisoner, who makes surreal art with bare knuckles. Owes a lot to A Clockwork Orange, but owes even more to the bravura performance by Tom Hardy, who appears in virtually every scene--about half of them smeared with blood and/or body paint--and does everything but cover Sid Vicious covering Paul Anka's "My Way."

No Happy Meal

Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

Crit

As with Lars von Trier's Antichrist, which I took a pass on for its 2-week downtown run, I was resistant to this one because I feared it wouldn't give me enough back to compensate me for how lousy I'd feel coming out. It finally took a 24-for-27 Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics consensus to get me to the theater, and I gotta say, sometimes democracy is a very good idea.

Is it unrelentingly hellish? Pretty much, yeah; there's a little relenting, such as when the title character (played by the never-acted-before Gabourey Sidibe, who, at the risk of parroting even the 3 critics who didn't like the film, is remarkable) asks the social worker played by Mariah Carey (and who the hell knew she could act?) the question that has followed her for her whole career, "What kind of color are you, anyway?" But not very damned much relenting (though bizarrely, it got a whole lot of laughs at the most squirmy moments from a sizable segment of a sizable audience; would be interesting, but perhaps not safe, to converse with the people who thought it was a comedy).

But what makes it bearable--yes, even (must . . . steel . . . self . . . to . . . use . . . word) uplifting, is that the humanity relents even less than the hellishness. Great, believable performances across the board, led by Mo'Nique as the villain of the piece for whom your heart finally breaks; if she doesn't win every supporting actress award available, God didn't make pigs' feet and collards.

Speaking of which, I can sympathize with the protest that the film trades upon a host of ghetto stereotypes, but "trades upon" is not the same as "exploits." The bottom line is that the film takes no prisoners, and if that's not something to go to the movies for, what is? A teenage vampire abstinence flick?

Trailer

• Brothers--Oh, right! Just realized when I was grabbing the IMDb link why this looks so familiar! It's a remake of the gripping 2004 Danish film Brødre, directed by Susanne Bier. This one is directed by Jim Sheridan (who, omigod, has a production of I, Claudius in production!) and stars Natalie Portman as the short side of the fraternal triangle, with Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal finally cast as the brothers we've thought they looked like all along. Question is, can you make this work without Denmark, which was a dark, cold character in the original.
  

Bless the beasts and the children

The Men Who Stare at Goats

Crit

Too goofy to be taken seriously, not consistently funny enough to be a completely satisfying hoot.
Ewan McGregor seems uncertain what movie he's in (understandable, given its schizoid character), but Clooney, Bridges, and Spacey soldier on admirably, and more successfully than the material deserves. And there are a lot of goats.

An Education

Crit

From the stills I'd seen, I was concerned that 20-something Carey Mulligan wouldn't convince me of her sixteenness, in a film where her sixteenness is crucial. Not to worry: she is spot-on throughout as the unusually-sophisticated-but-still-16-16 Jenny, and even as the answer to her key dilemma is painfully obvious to us, we can see (and feel) why it's not for her. And why she manages to blink out all the danger flares that flash whenever David (Peter Sarsgaard, perfectly cast) flips the vulnerable grin switch.

One thing, though: the event that finally tells her (and us) why it is necessary to run away as fast as her field-hockey-fit legs can carry her is a really clumsy bit of plotting that would get red-penciled in Screenwriting 100. Uh-uh. Would. Not. Happen.

Trailers

• A Single Man--Funny, a gay friend of mine knows My Future Wife Julianne Moore ("Julie," he calls her) and pronounces her sometimes too beautiful to carry on a conversation with. So you can sympathize with Colin Firth's character, who, though gay, is apparently expected to carry on more than a conversation with her here. Maybe "sympathize" isn't the right word.
  
• Bronson--Gosh. It sure doesn't look boring.
• The Crazies--I never thought I'd say this, but maybe it's time to let zombies rest for a while.
  

Ghosts

Aruitemo Aruitemo (Still walking)

Crit

A lovely elegiac film that proves that the Japanese can have as much guilt and bitterness about a premature death in the family as the Americans and French can. Disconcertingly, the patriarch and his wife and their perpetual condition of cold war seem to have been based on my parents.

Guy walks into a synagogue . . .

The Damned United

Crit

Ah, football footage from before my football time, a wonderful performance by Michael Sheen as the obsessive, hubris-overwhelmed manager Brian Clough, and support from the usual Brit character-actor suspects: Timothy Spall, Colm Meaney, Jim Broadbent. Great fun, and a perfectly straightforward narrative. Which was a good brain-rest ahead of . . .

A Serious Man

Crit

I don't know what the hell to make of this, except that I'm glad to have seen it. Job redux (with an inexplicable opening parable that I suppose can be said to set a mood of ambiguity, but that's kind of a stretch), wherein God's earthly representatives essentially answer all the eternal eternal questions with "don't ask," and only Grace Slick really seems to have a bead on the truth. A long, bizarre, entertaining shaggy Jew story.

Trailers

• Los abrazos rotos (Broken embraces)--New Pedro, so yes, absolutely. Can't see Penélope Cruz without thinking of a friend and former colleague who referred to her as "that little troll."
• Babies--Can't find it on IMDb, but it's about uh . . . babies, 4 of them, from 4 far-flung parts of the globe.
• Up in the Air--Not a huge Jason Reitman fan, but: Clooney.
  

The evil of banality

Paranormal Activity

Crit

Geez, this sure puts the occasional rat incursion in perspective.

Went to see what all the fuss is about, and I'm damned if I know. I guess I'd have to acknowledge that it's a well-crafted creeper: once the camera-running-overnight-in-bedroom trope is established, we can't help but study the frame--the doorway to the hall and stairs down, the bedsheets--to see what the next goof is going to be, but with the exception of a couple of good funhouse shocks and two genuinely chilling moments, a goof is mostly what it is, and a clichéd one. And matters aren't helped by the thoroughgoing blandness of the female half of the couple, and the nails-on-chalkboard annoyingness of the male. After a while you're not only down with the inevitability of their destruction by the demon, you can't wait.

Oh, one original bit, at least in my experience: the haunting is not of the house but of the person, so wherever she goes, her demon is Mary's-little-lambish. Only a lot more aggressive.

Trailers

• Daybreakers--A world where vampires are in the overwhelming majority, and they're still working on that "true blood" product.
  

Reduced-laugh diet

Zombieland

Crit

Fear not, oh you who aspire to write the first really funny zomcom: it is still to be done. Voiceover prelude sets the tone: you can just tell that the writers (Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, whoever they are) think this is killer stuff, when in fact it's mildly amusing at best. The one really funny segment--which I'll refer to as the BM sequence, so as not to spoil it--occurs midway through the film and then is just gone, gone, gone.

I almost skipped this on the basis of Manohla Dargis's review until I noticed that it was drawing a huge rating from the Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics. Inexplicable. Next time, I'll believe you, Manohla.

Weird little thing: isn't that familiar carousel tune whose name I don't know the one we hear in Strangers on a Train? I'll find out soon enough, since I'd already planned to watch it tonight.

Trailers

• The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day--Story in today's Times makes both the film and its writer-director, Troy Duffy, sound despicable.
  

Révolutionnaire

Coco avant Chanel

Crit

Partly a conventional love story, but in conflict with that is the interesting part, about Gabrielle Chanel's true love, independence. In this telling, Chanel (played by Audrey Tautou, frowning more than in her entire career heretofore) begins with a vision not of making black the new black but simply of doing something on her own, out from under the masculine thumb. Fashion is merely the long-gestated child of her strictly personal dissatisfaction with the frou-frou mode. In hackier hands a drama would have been spun from her affinity for wearing men's clothing and her stubborn resistance against amour, and then the one true (and doomed--yes, that's a spoiler, but no less subtle than we get onscreen) love who finally does come along would have been her hetero savior--thank god the filmmakers don't really care about the battle of the sexualities. A coda in which she stages a fashion show, applauded now as a legend, is the only note false to the film and to the title.