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You will soon be standing where we are now.
Only the young and idealistic would believe that they could reverse the course of a murderous regime with a few thousand mimeographed leaflets, but that is what the members of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi student resistance group, tried to do and that is the crime for which many of their members, including 21-year-old Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch), were executed.
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Steven Spielberg’s lengthy rumination about the effects of revenge as a response to terrorism succeeds on the level of a thriller but falls short of its larger goals. Seeking to be evenhanded, Munich ultimately sags under the weight of its own equivocation.
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Who would have guess that they could make a movie about gay sheepherders and people would flock to see it? Sorry, but that’s about the only Brokeback Mountain joke that I have not heard in the last eighteen months. I will admit that I went into this film with a degree of skepticism, fearing that it would be an earnest, self-conscious “message movie.” I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a carefully observed study of two sharply drawn individuals in a doomed relationship and how that relationship impacts their lives.
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Capote is a film that literally hangs on the performance of its star, so it’s a good thing that Philip Seymour Hoffman completely vanishes into the role of author Truman Capote. Without Hoffman’s presence, I’m afraid that this film wouldn’t hold together. It certainly wouldn’t have held my attention.
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This movie wants to be the Dr. Strangelove of the tobacco wars and I’ll be darned if doesn’t almost do it. Some might say that cigarettes are an even more audacious subject for a comedy than nuclear war, since tobacco takes out more people in a given year then the A-bomb has in the history of the human race. Thank You For Smoking certainly aims for big targets, but they are also easy targets. The film’s position, namely that tobacco companies have behaved with the all the moral fiber of Jeffrey Dahmer’s ne’er-do-well brother, is hardly original nor particularly newsworthy. This acid-etched satire, directed by Ivan Reitman’s son, Jason, scores its points with sharply drawn characters.
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Remember the good old days when an extended edition of a Peter Jackson film added texture and depth to an already impressive work? It seems like it was just a couple years ago. Oh, right, it was just a couple of years ago.
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The events of Joyeux Noël would scarcely be believed if the movie was a work of pure fiction. The greatest strength of Christian Carion’s film is that, if it were mere fiction, the film might actually make you believe the incredible events. The story is crafted carefully and the characters well-drawn, so that when the central event of the film occurs, their motivations and actions are believable within the context that they take place.
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C.S. Lewis’s much-loved fantasy cycle shares no small amount of DNA with J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Both were Oxford fellows who belonged to the same literary group, the Inklings. Tolkein was also primarily responsible for Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. The seven-part Narnia cycle is quite a bit more accessible than the Rings trilogy, however, and the movie version shares a similar relationship to Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Tolkein’s work. This is a Lord of the Rings movie for people who don’t want to sit through Jackson’s nine-hour trilogy.
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When you stand before God, you cannot say, “But I was told by others to do thus,” or that virtue was not convenient at the time. This will not suffice.
When I reviewed the theatrical cut of Ridley Scott’s Crusade-era epic Kingdom of Heaven, I made note that the film was long on spectacle and short on story and compelling characters. I was not in the minority in that opinion either. Fox, in order to bring the film down to a more commercial running time, pressured director Ridley Scott to cut it, emasculating the story in the process.
At the time, there was already work being done on this director’s cut, and I hoped that this version would restore the depth and substance that the theatrical version lacked. I am now pleased to report that this is exactly the case. This new, 196-minute version restores a number of scenes, sub-plots and entire characters that answer my objections and give this film a level of resonance worthy of the images on screen.
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Sired by Seabiscuit and Old Yeller, Dreamer is a journeyman pony with a lot of heart but not a lot of flash. Not showing us anything we haven’t seen before, it still runs a solid race and might even place or show on a good night. Okay, I think I’ve stretched that metaphor about as far as it will go without it snapping back and decapitating somebody.
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Jane Austen’s 1813 novel has almost been anointed as the “mother of all romantic comedies.” Certainly, its plot, in which the two protagonists disguise growing affection behind barbed language and outward contempt for each other, is now a well-trod path and was so even in Austen’s day. Lizzie (Keira Knightley) and Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen) are very much spiritual descendents of Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
It also has to be one of the most adapted novels in cinema history, with eight film versions, including this one, and three television adaptations. Joe Wright’s 2005 film manages to do a masterful job of compressing the novel’s plot into a reasonable two-hour running time. The movie manages to do justice to the film’s characters, Austen’s language and major themes within the confines of a feature length film.
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Prime illustrates that sharp writing and good casting can overcome a story that strains credibility to the breaking point. The main plot point of this film depends on a series of coincidences akin to getting struck by lightning on the same day you win the Powerball lottery. Fortunately, the actors and the characters they inhabit hold our empathy enough that we almost don’t notice.