A few late Christmas gifts

Bedtime Stories
It’s nice to see that Adam Sandler has softened over the years. He has yet to outgrow his penchant for silly voices, but you can’t always get what you want. “Bedtime Stories” is his first PG-rated family movie, and it finds a happy medium between cute and ribald, although it’s never all that funny or enchanting. Sandler plays a hotel handyman who discovers that elements from the bedtime stories he’s making up for his niece and nephew are coming true—gumballs rain from the sky, he’s accosted by a dwarf and the fairest maiden in the land falls in love with him. Kids will no doubt like the bedtime stories themselves, which are rendered in fast-paced special effects sequences, as well as the jokes about horse flatulence and a guinea pig with bulbous eyes, and they probably won’t care (or even notice) that the plot is a by-the-numbers job that hinges on whether or not the local elementary school will be demolished to make way for a new mega hotel. Adults will no doubt appreciate the inspired casting of Russell Brand as Sandler’s best pal, and fans of Sandler’s comedy won’t find the film nearly vulgar enough. “Bedtime Stories” is a mild diversion, energetic and sweet, but also predictable and forgettable.
Grade: C

Marley and Me
“Marley and Me” has a high sniffle factor, meaning it’s the type of movie that sets out to make you bawl your eyes out by the end. I didn’t cry myself, but I did, almost in spite of myself, feel a lump in my throat when Owen Wilson delivered a teary deathbed monologue to his dog (this is not a spoiler, as any film about the relationship between a human and a dog inevitably ends in the canine’s demise). Yes, the hard-hearted cynic in me was won over. I normally hate movies like this, movies that parade around cute puppies and attractive Hollywood stars and expects us to fawn over them and then get all blubbery at the end. But “Marley and Me,” based on John Grogan’s bestselling memoir, is smarter and funnier than most movies of this sort; it has personality and heart (and a good supporting performance by Alan Arkin, which never hurts), and its sentiments seem genuine. I went along with the misadventures of Marley, the world’s worst dog, and Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, who play his harried owners—they chase Marley around the house and fret as he chews on table legs and eviscerates couch cushions. Yes, it’s warm and fuzzy entertainment, punctuated by lots of “awww” moments, but it’s certainly not saccharine enough to engage your gag reflex.
Grade: B-

The Spirit
“The Spirit” looks great. If they had turned the sound off, they might have had something. It is a baffling, hollow, aimless mess, a sort of distant cousin to “Sin City”—it borrows that film’s visual palette (black, white and sepia tones with splashes of bright red and yellow) but can’t reproduce its excitements. It has all the right ingredients for a quirky pulp fantasy: Gabriel Macht has self-aware pluck as the titular masked crime fighter; Samuel L. Jackson is just right as the arch-villain the Octopus, so named because he has “eight of everything;” and the women in the cast—Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Jaime King, Sarah Paulson, Paz Vega—are so gorgeous that they upstage the CGI. But “The Spirit” has enough material for at least a dozen movies, and it juggles so many directionless subplots, empty characters and contradictory tones and styles, and the script never bothers to make heads or tails of it all. The movie has been written and directed by Frank Miller, who has taken Will Eisner’s 1940s comic book series and updated it to look like a pale retread of his vivid “Sin City” universe, but it’s black and white and dead all over.
Grade: D

Valkyrie
Here we have a good historical thriller that is prevented from ever being great because we don’t give a damn about anybody in it. “Valkyrie” stars Tom Cruise as General Claus von Stauffenberg, who led the German Resistance, plotted to kill Hitler and masterminded Operation Valkryie, which would have overthrown the Nazi regime had it been successful. It’s a fascinating story, yes, but none of the characters in the movie are written or acted with a sense of real human emotion. There are some great actors at work here—Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp—but when the famous July 20 assassination attempt finally unfolds in the film, we’re enthralled by its mechanics, not because we really care about Stauffenberg or any of his accomplices. Cruise is so sterile and unmoving that we never get the sense that he’s the great man the movie wants him to be, and that creates a gaping void at the emotional center of the film. “Valkyrie” is a finely-tuned machine, and although it hits all of its marks at exactly the right time, it does so with very little feeling.
Grade: B-

Yes Man
In 1997, Jim Carrey made a movie called “Liar Liar,” in which he played a dishonest lawyer who, by way of his young son’s birthday wish, cannot tell a lie no matter how hard he tries. Now Carrey has made “Yes Man,” in which he plays a negative bank loan exec who gets a new lease on life when he challenges himself to say “yes” to everything. Both concepts are very similar, which makes this movie easy to review: “Liar Liar” was funny, “Yes Man” not as much, so if “Liar Liar” gets a B, then “Yes Man” clocks in somewhere around a C. Remember the scene in “Liar Liar” where Jim Carrey wants to say the blue pen is red but can’t? Or the scene where he beats himself up until he’s a bloody pulp? Or the scene where he goes into the board room meeting and has to tell all of the horrible businessmen what he really thinks about them? There are no sequences like that in “Yes Man,” no big comic set pieces that allow Carrey to tangle up his body parts and contort his face and really steal the show. It’s a mundane plot about a mundane character that quickly develops into a mundane love story, as Carrey courts the beautiful Zooey Deschanel, who, once she catches on to the whole “yes-to-everything” bit, wonders if he really meant his answer when she asked him if he loved her. “Yes Man” is pleasant enough, but it’s missing the big laughs we expect when we go to a Jim Carrey comedy.
Grade: C

Running out of lifelines

Slumdog Millionaire
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” is virtuoso filmmaking. It is a wonderful romance of old-fashioned Hollywood storytelling and Bollywood sensibilities, and it is a superb movie, even though you’ve no doubt seen the story—a resourceful orphan defeats the odds, makes it big in the world and falls in love with a beautiful woman—worked over before in countless other movies.

But this one seems different. When the hero’s girl gets stuck in traffic, for instance, I just knew that, based on a time-honored tradition, that she would get out of the car and go running down the street so she can see her boyfriend on television and just make it in time to see his Big Moment. Clichéd, yes, but I bought it hook, line and sinker. I think you will, too.

“Slumdog Millionaire” overcomes the familiarity of its story in a few ways: 1) Its ingenious framing device, which involves our hero on the Hindi version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” 2) a terrific lead performance by an 18-year-old actor named Dev Patel, which grounds the film in reality, and 3) Boyle’s direction, which is spirited and fresh, and Simon Beaufroy’s script, which is full of life.

Patel plays Jamal, who, as the movie begins, has made it to the final question (worth 20 million rupees) on the “Millionaire” show. In between commercial breaks, he’s apprehended by the police on suspicion of cheating—how could a poor kid from the slums be such a wealth of knowledge?

How, for example, does he know who is on the American $100 bill? He doesn’t even know that Gandhi’s face is on the 1000 rupee note. And how does he know about cricket and Alexandre Dumas and British rowing teams and Bollywood movie stars and Samuel Colt?

After some cruel and coercive interrogation methods, the police inspector (Irfan Khan) relents and questions Jamal about his life in the slums of Mumbai, and the movie works backward so that we see Jamal growing up and how specific events from his past gave him the answers for certain questions on the show.

When Jamal is a boy (played by Ayush Mahesh Khedekar), his mother is killed in an anti-Muslim raid, and he and his brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail) are left to fend for themselves. They’re apprehended by a devious gangster who uses orphans in an operation to gather money through panhandling; eventually they escape, but they have to leave behind their friend Latika, who becomes for Jamal what the green light at the end of the pier was for Gatsby.

The brothers get by scamming tourists—they impersonate tour guides, supplying false information (did you know that the Taj Mahal was originally intended to be a big hotel?) and stealing the shoes off the feet of hapless Americans, which they later sell. Salim becomes involved in nefarious criminal activities, and when he and Jamal do eventually run into Latika, whose virginity is being sold to the highest bidder, his reaction is not expected.

And now we’re in present day, as Jamal, working in a call center, continues to search for Latika (played as an adult by the beautiful Freida Pinto) and now for Salim, as Salim has more or less kidnapped her. And what are the odds that Latika will see Jamal on television, realize he’s the right one for her and rush off to find him?

This is an exhilarating plot—reading the synopsis makes you want to see the movie, doesn’t it?—and if it sounds overly complicated, I can assure you that it most certainly is not. “Slumdog Millionaire” is the product of imaginative yet efficient storytelling—it winds its way through past and present, it heaps on subplots, it follows characters over the course of two decades. And yet it never feels padded or showy, not a sequence is out of place, and although the elements of the story may feel familiar, the structure keeps us on our toes.

At the center of all this is Dev Patel, an honest, natural performer making his film debut. He is perfectly cast as both a street-smart whiz kid and as a soft-spoken romantic who seems overwhelmed by his own intelligence. He’s convincing, too, in his battle of wits with the interrogator and with Anil Kapoor, who plays the two-faced “Millionaire” host who may be throwing the game.

Danny Boyle is a great filmmaker, and his movies have run the gamut from horror (“28 Days Later”) to black comedy (“Trainspotting”) to family films (“Millions”). But this is the best and most exciting picture he’s made, and it takes a great director to approach foreign material with such a sure hand. “Slumdog Millionaire” is an invigorating film, and the more I think about it, the more I love it.

Grade: A+

Note: The film is rated R, most likely due to some violent material involving children. Do not let it scare you or your family away; it is nothing that older kids and teenagers can’t handle.

Directed by Danny Boyle. Written by Simon Beaufroy. Based on the novel “Q&A” by Vikas Swarup. Starring Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Tanay Hemant Chheda, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala, Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar, Anil Kapoor and Irfan Khan. R; 120m.

Sci-fi at a standstill

The Day the Earth Stood Still
Review by Nathan Weinbender

They’ve been showing the original version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” on TV a lot recently, most likely to cash in on the release of the new remake.

It’s a great film—the one from 1951, that is—but, if the new film’s producers are responsible for its heavy rotation on television, they should be aware that it was a counter-productive marketing decision. After all, when you see the remake, you’ll only wish you had stayed at home and watched the original.

I certainly felt that way after leaving the theater on Saturday. I decided to see “The Day the Earth Stood Still” in IMAX because I figured that the special effects would look great on that huge screen. They did, but they didn’t bolster the story or the characters, which would have appeared just as lethargic on a regular-sized screen.

The movie opens and we see Keanu Reeves climbing a mountain in the snow. He reaches the top and approaches a glowing green orb, which he then punctures with his pickaxe. The screen is bathed in a bright, white light, and now Keanu has a weird marking on the back of his hand, or something. Does that mean he's an alien now, or was he an alien before he ascended that mountain? I don’t know.

Cut to New Jersey, where Jennifer Connelly is a biologist at Princeton. One night she’s fixing dinner for her stepson (Jaden Smith) and the next thing you know the Army knocks on her door and she’s whisked away in a van filled with other scientists. It’s a matter of national security: An unidentified object is hurtling toward Manhattan, and they only have an hour before it hits!

It turns out to be another one of those glowing green orbs, and out comes a humanoid that is, much like in the original, shot by the uppity military. The creature quickly evolves into Reeves, whose name is Klaatu and who has come to Earth to save it from ecological distress, even if it means obliterating the human race.

How much harm can that do? After all, we’re only one species in a universe of billions (and a destructive one at that). Klaatu gets the once-over from Secretary of Defense Kathy Bates. “What do you want with our planet?” she asks. I love his response: “Your planet?” Klaatu ends up escaping from his captors with Connelly’s help, and the two of them, along with her stepson, end up in the middle of a forest where Klaatu conjures yet another green orb from a swamp.

Then we see more orbs emerging from the earth—in the Sahara Desert, over the pyramids, from out of the rain forest—and we learn that Klaatu is working like Noah with his ark, capturing two of every species inside these glowing balls.

Eventually, with Earth’s doomsday clock ticking away, we get the obligatory shots of decay and destruction. The special effects are very good, especially in the IMAX format: I especially liked the shot of the semi truck disintegrating into dust, and the sequence detailing the destruction of Giants Stadium.

But, in the end, the story just isn’t as compelling this time around; it doesn’t grab us in the same way the original film did. It also doesn’t have much of a story beyond its basic exposition, and it builds to a torrent of special effects rather than to a sensible conclusion, eventually declaring a simple-minded, heavy-handed “save the Earth” adage.

“The Day the Earth Stood Still” has the affectation of a B-movie and the wherewithal of a blockbuster, meaning it’s big, glossy, well-produced and emotionally hollow. Here’s a test: Watch a five minute segment from each version of this movie and you tell me which one will have you shouting “Klaatu barada nikto.”

Grade: C

Directed by Scott Derrickson. Written by David Scarpa. Based on a screenplay by Edmund H. North. Starring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Jaden Smith, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Kyle Chandler and John Cleese. PG-13; 103m.

The life and death of a martyr

Milk
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Gus Van Sant has been trying to get “Milk” made for the last fifteen years, and in that span of time various actors—Robin Williams, Richard Gere, James Woods—have been considered for the role of Harvey Milk, a San Francisco city supervisor who was the country’s first openly gay public official.

But now that the film has been made, it’s impossible to imagine anyone but Sean Penn playing Milk. Penn is one of our finest actors, and this is without a doubt his best performance. He inhabits the character so concretely that there are long stretches during the film where we simply forget he is acting: Penn does not portray Harvey Milk, he is Harvey Milk.

Watch the documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” and you’ll see what I mean. Study how the real Milk behaved and then note that every aspect of Penn’s performance—his appearance, his accent, his speech pattern, his hand gestures, his facial expressions—mirrors Milk just perfectly. Yet this is not a mere impersonation. Penn is so warm, so affable, so sincere, so human, so complex that he draws us into the film and into Milk’s universe. It is a rich performance, filled with wonderful little quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Take, for instance, the moment when Milk first learns he has won the election for supervisor: A mix of surprise and ecstasy and disbelief cross his face, and it feels so spontaneous, so real, and it sent a chill down my spine, because with such a simple gesture I was convinced that this is one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen.

The film begins in 1972, when Milk, a former insurance salesman, moved to the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco and opened a camera store with his lover Scott Smith (James Franco). Fed up with the stringent, discriminatory laws against homosexuals, Milk became a vocal advocate for gay rights, standing on a soapbox and shouting into a megaphone.

He gathered a devoted following, and when people begin calling him “the Mayor of Castro Street” (“I actually may have started calling myself that,” Harvey later recalls in the movie), he was inspired to campaign for State Supervisor, which he did (unsuccessfully) three separate times, and again for the State Assembly.

But it wasn’t until 1977, when Milk was 47, that his political career proved fruitful. The city’s electoral process changed that year, as supervisors were chosen based on their districts, and Milk was elected as supervisor for the Castro District. Also elected was Dan White (Josh Brolin), a former policeman who represented the clean-cut ideals of the white Middle America, and who had serious moral qualms with the nefarious lifestyle that Milk represented.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of “Milk” is its depiction of White, who was eventually responsible for the murders of both Harvey Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone. The film does not vilify him or hold him in contempt, instead quietly examining his demeanor and behavior, so perfectly mannered, and allowing us to decide what motivated his crimes.

Was he really intolerant of gays, or was he himself a closet case who hid behind his moral values and used sudden violence as a way to distract himself from the fact? Or was he just emotionally unstable, and fed up with supporting his family on such a meager salary? Or was he simply tired of always being in the shadow of Harvey Milk?

Brolin is very good here, and his is one of several brilliant supporting performances in the film—Emile Hirsch as one of Milk’s hangers-on; Diego Luna as Milk’s eccentric Spanish lover; Denis O’Hare as John Briggs, a state legislator who supports Prop 6, a controversial initiative that will prohibit gays from acquiring teaching positions; and Franco, who wants Harvey to choose him over his ambitious political career.

What these actors do is quite remarkable, creating living, breathing characters in short periods of time. And although Penn is at the center of the story, he doesn’t chew the scenery or steal scenes or distract our attention away from the other actors or allow the other characters to be sucked into gravitational pull of his performance. It’s exhilarating to see so many superb actors working together on the screen.

“Milk,” too, is a triumph for Van Sant, who, since hitting his commercial peak with “Good Will Hunting,” has mostly defined himself to modest, low-budget pictures like “Elephant,” “Gerry” and “Paranoid Park.” This is his masterpiece, and nothing he has done before would have suggested that he could be such a grand conductor of character, style and story.

When the film ends and we see footage of the real Harvey Milk, celebrating after his historical political victory, it is both poignant and shocking—poignant because we have suddenly become painfully aware of Milk’s mortality, and shocking because we realize how uncanny Penn’s performance has been. “Milk” is a marvelous film, and a touching portrait of a remarkable man. It’s also the best American film I’ve seen so far this year.

Grade: A+

Directed by Gus Van Sant. Written by Dustin Lance Black. Starring Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, James Franco, Alison Pill, Victor Garber and Denis O’Hare. R; 128m.

The notties of 2008

The Worst Films of the Year
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

Before I announce my picks for the best films of the year, let us reflect on the worst. The following are the ten biggest bombs of 2008, in alphabetical order.

88 Minutes
This may be the worst film Al Pacino has ever made, and, yes, I’ve taken “Cruising” into consideration. “88 Minutes” plays like a bad made-for-cable thriller, and it probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day had he not been attached. It throws so many red herrings at the audience, you’ll end up smelling like a fishmonger.

10,000 B.C.

When I think of prehistoric action pictures, I think of those B-movies from the ‘60s starring Raquel Welch in cheetah-print miniskirts. Those films were just as terrible as “10,000 B.C.,” but they were also entertaining in a campy, embarrassing way. Basically, they knew they were bad. But this movie, directed by Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day”) takes itself so damn seriously and runs on for so damn long that it’s just never any fun.

Death Race

More of an arcade game than a feature film, this remake of the 1975 Roger Corman satire “Death Race 2000” ignores the humorous undertones of the original and adds scene after scene in which souped-up cars a) hit people, b) fly into the air and crash, and c) explode, not necessarily in that order. It’s loud, tedious and boring.

The Happening
Movies like this must be designed specifically for the Razzie Awards. M. Night Shyamalan’s newest is a lock in nearly every category for this year’s Razzies—it boasts wooden performances (especially from the usually radiant Zooey Deschanel), awkward dialogue, lead-footed plotting, confused direction. And its worst offense: It goes absolutely nowhere and says absolutely nothing.

The Hottie and the Nottie

It’s almost too easy to pick on “The Hottie and the Nottie,” a Paris Hilton vehicle that should have gone straight to DVD. It is, though, an offensively stupid, aggressively unfunny comedy, and one of the most pathetic films to receive a wide release in a long while.

The Love Guru

My pick for the very worst film of the year. The previous two films on this list were serious candidates, but neither had the potential of “The Love Guru,” especially considering Mike Myers was at its helm. Rarely have I heard a crowded movie theater as quiet during a comedy—all of its jokes are labored, relying on out-of-vogue pop culture references and childish double entendres. And the plot, involving Myers’ annoying self-help guru saving a hockey star’s marriage, is seriously stupid.

Rambo

I expected Sylvester Stallone’s return to his “Rambo” series to be a lot of things, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be as depressing, unpleasant and repetitive as it is. It’s offensive that real sociopolitical issues (in this case, mass genocide in Southeast Asia) are here being exploited as plot points in a brain-dead action blockbuster.

Righteous Kill

Al Pacino may have starred in two dreadful action pictures this year, but his career will no doubt recover. After the one-two punch of “88 Minutes” and “Righteous Kill,” I certainly won’t. Robert De Niro has also been wrangled into this mess, which is a low-rent, lame-brained cop thriller with a final twist that you can telegraph from the get-go. Hoo-hah, indeed.

Speed Racer

I appreciate that the Wachowski brothers are trying to do something different. And I admire their attempts to elevate a low-budget Japanese cartoon into candy-colored, high-fructose pop art. But “Speed Racer” is a self-indulgent, overlong eyesore, with a plot that’s as uninteresting as its color palette is garish. Let’s just call it the “Tron” of this generation.

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan

Had this movie been trimmed by a good half hour, it may have just missed the cut for this list. But Adam Sandler’s latest picture drones on and on without ever finding a purpose or hitting its comedic stride. The script is credited to three writers—Sandler, Robert Smigel and Judd Apatow—all of whom are smarter and funnier than this film would lead you to believe.

Dishonorable Mention: “Bangkok Dangerous,” starring Nic Cage as an assassin who just wants to be loved; the overwrought video game adaptation “Max Payne;” Wong Kar Wai’s arthouse snoozer “My Blueberry Nights;” “The Ruins,” a nasty, cliché-ridden shocker about killer plants; “Soul Men,” which put the talents of Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mac to waste; Will Ferrell in “Step Brothers” and “Semi-Pro;” and “Fool’s Gold,” which featured Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson as spray-tanned airheads who stumble upon treasure and was the only film of 2008 that I walked out of halfway through.

Death-defying high-wire acts

The DVD Beat
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

Two of the year’s best movies are being released on DVD today. One is the biggest blockbuster of the last ten years; the other is a modest documentary that played in limited release earlier this fall. They couldn’t be more dissimilar, but they both represent pinnacles of their genres—an action movie with a brain and a non-fiction film that plays like a riveting thriller.

The Dark Knight
Since its release in July, “The Dark Knight,” Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to his critically-lauded “Batman Begins,” has grossed nearly $1 billion internationally—no doubt it’ll be the biggest DVD of all time. But overlooking box office figures, “The Dark Knight” is a masterpiece of storytelling, and a damn exciting action picture, and it is going to be admired, I think, for a very long time. I have already written extensively about the film, and my original review can be found here.
Grade: A+

Man on Wire
The real find of the week, though, is James Marsh’s superb “Man on Wire,” which recalls French wirewalker Philippe Petit’s greatest feat: In 1974, he strung a wire between the top floors of the towers of the World Trade Center and traversed it eight times. Marsh combines archival footage, re-creations and interviews (heavy echoes of Errol Morris) to create the most harrowing and exciting documentary I’ve seen since “Touching the Void.” The story unfolds like a great thriller, and, although we already know how everything will end, the tension is palpable as Petit and his crew prepare for their great exploit. Much of the movie consists of recent interviews with Petit, and he is filled with such childlike enthusiasm that it’s impossible not to be caught up in the fervor of “Man on Wire.” Watching him glide across the cable, over a thousand feet in the air and just one wrong step away from death, is pure poetry, and as a testament to the Twin Towers, the movie is breathtaking.
Grade: A+

An antidote to ‘Twilight’ fever

Let the Right One In
Review by Nathan Weinbender

I’ve just seen a movie that will bowl you over. It’s called “Let the Right One In,” and it is a masterpiece. It is a Swedish import about the relationship between a twelve-year-old boy and a vampire, and it is lovely, tender, heartbreaking. If you have not seen it, find a way.

Do not be scared away by the fact that the movie is about a vampire. It is not a horror film or a thriller; it’s a poignant coming-of-age story that just happens to concern an adolescent bloodsucker. It is sometimes bloody, but it does not resort to cheap shocks. It is about children, but it is not a children’s film, and it draws characters that are wise beyond their years.

One of the protagonists is Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), who is smart and resourceful but very unpopular, and who bears the brunt of the school bully’s cruelest tricks. When his teacher warns the class about a serial killer who has been draining young people of their blood, Oskar does not cower—he clips out the newspaper headlines and pastes them in an album.

He likes to sit out in the dilapidated playground behind his apartment building, and there he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), who is also twelve (“more or less”) but looks a lot older—her face is creased with deep lines, her eyes have dark circles underneath—and she smells funny, like a corpse. But she is intriguing and she likes Oskar, and they continue to meet every night on the jungle gym.

Eli, as you may have gathered, is the vampire in the story, yet Oskar doesn’t realize it. Yes, she’s strange, but then so is he, so he doesn’t question. And when he does finally discover her secret, he isn’t scared, he’s intrigued. She, in turn, becomes his protector, and her confrontation with Oskar's tormentors at school is terrifying, gratifying and, somehow, strangely moving.

There are some strange subplots lurking at the corners of the screenplay, including the relationship between Eli and a creepy middle-aged man (Per Ragnar) who commits grisly murders to provide her with blood, and the perils of a woman (Ika Nord) who is bitten by Eli and finds herself slowly turning into a vampire.

But Oskar and Eli are the heart of “Let the Right One In,” and they personify in equal parts the wistfulness and hopelessness of adolescence, and the dreamy idealism of a first love. Hedebrant and Leandersson are remarkable in roles that very few child actors could pull off—that they have never acted before certainly helps, because they find an organic approach to the material that makes it feel so real.

If “Let the Right One In” bears any resemblance to “Twilight,” the popular teen vampire romance currently in release, it is in premise only. This movie, unlike “Twilight,” is thoughtful and doesn’t tell its story in broad, dumbed-down strokes; it intelligently explores the relationship between an innocent and a monster, and it is so much more artistically engaging. It’s a shame it won’t make nearly as much money.

It also doesn’t sanitize the more macabre aspects of vampirism as “Twilight” does, and although the film does contain moments of sudden violence, director Tomas Anderson finds beauty in grotesque images. Look at the climax of the movie, which is set at an indoor pool, which is photographed, edited and acted so brilliantly and originally that I cannot imagine it being done any better.

“Let the Right One In” is one of the best films of 2008, a picture that, like Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth,” is a fairy tale for grown-ups. It channels the icy silences of Bergman, the dream-like reverie of Fellini and the adolescent torment of Malle.

And, more than any other recent movie, recalls the pangs of childhood very well. “I’ve been twelve for a very long time,” Eli says at one point. Isn’t that how most twelve-year-olds feel anyway?

Grade: A+

Directed by Tomas Alfredson. Written by John Ajvide Lindqvist; based on his novel. Starring Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist and Peter Carlberg. R; 114m.

A screenwriter for every Christmas

Four Christmases
Review by Nathan Weinbender

It took four people to write the script for “Four Christmases”—one guy to watch every holiday comedy ever made, another guy to note every cliché of the genre, a third guy to assemble those clichés into a story, and a fourth guy to put it all into screenplay format. I’m guessing they took turns typing.

The movie stars Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon as a disgruntled couple who escape to tropical locales every Christmas, telling their respective families that no, they can’t come over because, darn the luck, they’re doing humanitarian work in Burma.

This year, they’re headed for Fiji, but they’re stranded at the airport because of heavy fog. When they’re interviewed on the local news, their families see them on TV, and now they have no choice but to visit their loved ones. Since both Vaughn and Witherspoon’s parents are divorced, we are treated to four separate Christmases, all in the span of a very long 24 hours.

Before I go any further, let’s look at the movie’s cast. Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon are big stars—talented, appealing, bankable. Their parents are played by Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight and Mary Steenburgen, all of whom have Oscars. That’s five Oscars if you also count Witherspoon’s.

What could have possibly drawn so many talented people to this script, which plays like a dour TV sitcom? Money, I suppose, and perhaps the prospect of not actually having to act.

The actors all play variations on characters they’ve played a hundred times before: Duvall is the backwoods hick, Spacek is the grass-roots bohemian chick, Steenburgen is the upper-crust socialite right out of “Good Housekeeping” and Voight is the voice of reason. How uninspired.

Wouldn’t it have been more fun had they switched the casting around, so that Voight was cursing and swilling beer and Steenburgen was eating pot brownies with her son’s best friend, who is also her lover?

Also in the mix are Jon Favreau, who recently directed “Iron Man,” and country star Tim McGraw, who play Vaughn’s uncouth brothers. They’re Ultimate Fighters, thick-necked and tattooed, and they put Vaughn in headlocks and wrestle him to the floor. Har-de-har.

And Dwight Yoakam plays Steenburgen’s beau, a preacher whose congregations are more like Super Bowl half-time shows. His character has the most potential—naturally, the script eschews his scenes in favor of brainless slapstick involving Witherspoon being urped on by babies and Vaughn falling off the roof while trying to install a satellite dish.

“Four Christmases” is obvious from beginning to end, and, in its desperation for laughs, it frequently substitutes chaos for comedy. Listen, future comedy writers: It’s not funny to have your characters just scream at one another, especially if they all do it at the same time so that, if they do happen to say anything clever, we can’t make it out over the pandemonium on screen.

I imagine that the actors in this movie could have come up with a smarter, funnier screenplay themselves.

Grade: C

Directed by Seth Gordon. Written by Matt R. Allen, Caleb Wilson, Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Starring Vince Vaughn, Reese Witherspoon, Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, Mary Steenburgen, Kristin Chenoweth, Jon Favreau, Tim McGraw and Dwight Yoakam. PG-13; 82m.

They come from the Land Down Under

Australia
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia” wants very much to be a great film, which may be the reason it never attains greatness. But it is a good film, one that sets out to be an everlasting love story and ends up being an old-fashioned diversion with ambitions that exceed its grasp.

The movie fondly remembers a time when Hollywood specialized in grand, sweeping epics, when Cecil B. DeMille and David Lean were kings, when a movie’s budget was just as important to an audience as its stars, when the best films were the ones that required an intermission.

“Australia” certainly has star power (Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman), it certainly has breadth (it lasts nearly three hours), and it certainly had no budgetary constraints (it cost $130 million to make). But it’s also certainly not a legitimate epic, nor is it a film that’s destined to be a classic, which is obviously what it strives to be.

The story begins in 1939 during World War II, as Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman), a haughty British aristocrat, travels to her late husband’s cattle ranch, called Faraway Downs, only to find him dead. The tract of land where the ranch is located in the only piece of Australia not owned by the deviant King Carney (Bryan Brown), who is stealing herds of cattle off of the Ashley’s property.

Jackman plays a hunky cattle drover who agrees to help Lady Ashley lead cattle across the desert to Carney’s territory. They bring along a precocious Aboriginal boy (Brandon Walters), whose grandfather is a mysterious magic man (David Gulpilil) who has been accused of killing Ashley’s husband. He’s also a convenient deus ex machina whenever the script hits a dead end.

It’s obligatory that Kidman and Jackman will fall in love, which is fine in theory. But the romance in “Australia” feels phony, especially considering how quickly the Lady Ashley character recovers from her husband’s untimely death. The actors have chemistry, but their relationship is thinly written.

“Australia” could have ended there, as a pleasant little film about a cattle drive, but Luhrmann takes the script in another direction. The latter half of the film concerns the Japanese bombing of Darwin and the “Stolen Generation” of Aboriginal children, and the juxtaposition of serious historical melodrama with the gee-whiz charm of the movie’s beginning sequences is jarring.

Perhaps I’m being too stingy. I enjoyed the movie to a point, and I admired its intentions, no matter how conventional. And I was completely captivated by the look of the film—I sat in the very front row of the theater, the screen towering over me, and let the images wash over me. If nothing else, this is a gorgeous movie.

Yet Luhrmann, who hasn’t made a film since “Moulin Rouge” in 2001, wants “Australia” to be an epic, and it simply isn’t. It’s missing the humanity, the grandeur, the importance of a picture like “Gone with the Wind.”

With all of the fires, explosions, stampedes and daring escapes in this movie, do you know what the most captivating moment is? A character goes to see “The Wizard of Oz,” and we’re reminded of how magical a film can be. It’s unfortunate that “Australia” doesn’t reach the same levels of enchantment.

Grade: B-

Directed by Baz Luhrmann. Written by Stuart Beattie, Luhrmann, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan. Starring Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, Brandon Walters, Bryan Brown, David Gulpilil, Jack Thompson and Ben Mendelsohn. PG-13; 165m.

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride

Rachel Getting Married
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married” has so much life in it. It feels so real, so honest. As a portrait of a troubled family playing emotional pick-up sticks, it is sometimes bitterly funny and always brutally frank, and it is candid to the point that I think a lot of people will be made uncomfortable by it.

The film, written by Jenny Lumet, is more of a document than it is a story, attaining the same fly-on-the-wall authenticity that Robert Altman perfected in his work. Like real life, the movie is often messy, directionless, open-ended. It relishes minutiae, asides, overlapping dialogue; it imbeds us firmly within its universe of strange family customs and household chaos. It is brimming with characters, some of whom demand our attention and others who remain only on the periphery.

You may not appreciate Demme’s approach here—a few people at the screening I attended walked out early—and the prospect of simply watching people prepare for a wedding may not appeal to you. But I love movies like this, movies that give weight to basic human experiences, that create palpable environments and characters, that peer in on a world already in progress. It’s like eavesdropping, and it’s fascinating.

Anne Hathaway stars as Kym, a troubled young woman who, as the film opens, has been given a day pass from rehab to attend her sister Rachel’s wedding, which is being held at her childhood home in Connecticut.

Her father (Bill Irwin) is congenial to a fault—he pushes hospitality and courtesy on everybody, likely to distract himself from his past. Her mother (Debra Winger), who has divorced and re-married, is an almost ethereal presence: She tends to vaporize in and out of scenes, wearing an expression that suggests she’d rather be elsewhere.

Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) loves Kym desperately, but she quietly resents the fact that her sister can’t overcome her own checkered past. During the wedding party, for instance, when everyone has nothing but nice things to say to the bride and groom (Tunde Adebimpe, frontman for the rock group TV on the Radio), Kym takes the opportunity to toast and utilizes it as a way to excise her inner demons.

One of the twelve steps, she tells her nervously-shifting audience, is apology, but even as she begs forgiveness, we sense twinges of narcissism creeping through Kym’s attempts at selflessness.

The movie lingers on the minor details of the day—arguing over bridesmaid dresses, washing the dishes, determining whether or not there is enough food for the guests, the band practicing in the back yard as the tent and the folding chairs are being set up.

There are also sequences, perhaps the most effective in the film, in which Kym attends her mandatory AA meetings. Demme finds the perfect notes in these scenes—they feel uncompromisingly real.

I have read some snide comments about the film resembling a wedding video, a criticism that likely stems from Demme’s decision to use guerilla-style handheld camerawork—to be fair, it is sometimes distracting. But I have never seen a home video in which the characters are presented so nakedly before us, and I have never attended a wedding so busy, so joyful, so cathartic.

Grade: A

Directed by Jonathan Demme. Written by Jenny Lumet. Starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Tunde Adebimpe, Mather Zickel, Anna Deavere Smith, Anisa George and Debra Winger. R; 113m.

Falling in love is hard on the fangs

Twilight
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Let me address something right up front: I am not a 15-year-old girl. If I was, however, I think I would have enjoyed “Twilight” a lot more than I did.

I can make this assumption because I saw it on a Saturday afternoon with an audience comprised mostly of 15-year-old girls. They liked the movie. I could tell because they were squealing with delight.

There were groups of young girls convening in the lobby after the film. Some of them were clutching their tattered paperback copies of the “Twilight” books. Others were wearing “Twilight” T-shirts. And all they could talk about was how dreamy Edward was. Edward, if you didn’t know, is dreamy. Really dreamy. He’s also a vampire. Go figure.

He also has a penetrating stare—he can look straight through you and down into your soul—and he bewitches Bella (Kristen Stewart), the new girl in town. She thinks he’s intriguing because he avoids her gaze, says very few words and saves her life a couple of times. She also thinks he’s really, really dreamy.

Edward, played by Robert Pattinson, is in a “family” with a bunch of other vamps, but they’re vegetarians. They drink the blood of animals, not of humans, and they co-exist peacefully with mortals: Edward and his “brothers” and “sisters” all attend the same high school, and his father is the town doctor.

There’s a lot of manufactured sexual tension between Edward and Bella, all rendered very simplistically: She loves him; he loves her, too, but is afraid of the consequences of their relationship; she’s willing to become a vampire, too; he wouldn’t dream of killing her, even though he really, really wants to suck her blood.

Teen girls eat this stuff up. They seem to be so caught up in the film’s basic notion (that a dark, mysterious, handsome stranger will sweep them off their feet) that they fail to notice that these characters are so superficially drawn.

But what does it matter what I think? This film was not made for me, or for anyone else who is far removed from the “Twilight” universe. If you are in the target demographic at which “Twilight” has been pitched, you will love this movie. If you aren’t, the makers of this movie don’t care about you.

Grade: C

Note: There is a Swedish film currently playing in limited release called “Let the Right One In,” and it also concerns the blossoming friendship between a young mortal and a vampire. It is a masterpiece—inventive, darkly funny and disarmingly sweet. It is one of the very best films of 2008, infinitely more thoughtful than “Twilight.” My review for that film will be up shortly.

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke. Written by Melissa Rosenberg. Based on the novel by Stephanie Meyer. Starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Ashley Greene, Nikki Reed, Jackson Rathbone, Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli and Cam Gigandet. PG-13; 122m.

Journeys to both ends of the Earth

The DVD Beat
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

The Pick of the Week
WALL-E
WALL-E is an amazingly expressive character, yet he doesn’t speak. He communicates in blips and bleeps and other sound effects, but he has a wonderfully animated pair of eyes that resemble binoculars and convey just about every emotion. I suppose it would be more appropriate to refer to WALL-E as an “it,” not a “he,” but he—yes, he—is such a lovely character that we soon forget he’s a hunk of metal and invest our emotions in him.

He is a cute, ambulatory robot, existing alone on a long-desolate Earth. Some 800 years ago, when humans vacated the planet and now live comfortably in an orbiting space station, WALL-E’s were left behind to deal with waste management. Our WALL-E is the only one of his kind left, and over time he has developed a precocious personality.

WALL-E is lonely, with only an ever-resilient cockroach to keep him company, and he fantasizes about romance while watching his favorite movie, “Hello, Dolly.” When a robot called EVE shows up to search for plant life on Earth, WALL-E is smitten. But when EVE is summoned back to the human’s space station, WALL-E follows, and he incites mayhem aboard the ship, liberating a group of malfunctioning robots.

This is the point in the story when “WALL-E” sort of loses steam. It goes from an engaging physical comedy to an environmental sci-fi fable that only partially works. The space station is inhabited by fat, lazy humans, who resemble pustules in hovering chairs that they never get out of. They’re not as engaging as WALL-E himself, and it’s too bad that director Andrew Stanton, who previously helmed “A Bug’s Life” and “Finding Nemo,” can’t quite sustain the magic of the film’s opening half hour.

But “WALL-E” is not only a great animated film, but a great film period. Pixar continues to prove that animation is not just a medium for children, and that family films can be sophisticated, intelligent and charming.

Grade: A-

Also on DVD
Encounters at the End of the World
Werner Herzog’s “Encounters at the End of the World” would probably be just another Discovery Channel nature documentary had it not been for Herzog himself. He is such an engaging character, and his off-beat narration is so earnestly kooky that it almost threatens to overtake the images. Actually, I take that back. The images in this movie are glorious, Herzog or not. The director travels to the South Pole to observe the scientists living and working there, and he finds some tremendously interesting people—a man who was nearly kidnapped and killed by Venezuelan militants, another who discovered he was of royal Aztec heritage because of the lines on his hands, a lady who once “traveled from Denver to Bolivia in a sewer pipe.” The world below the ice is even more astonishing. There are moments in the movie where Herzog allows his camera to simply observe, and the sights of the strange aquatic life, the towering icebergs and the vast desolation of the ocean are, at times, breathtaking. And then there’s Herzog at the center of everything. When he secures an interview with an eccentric penguin biologist, what does he ask? “Is there such a thing as a gay penguin?” You have to love the guy.
Grade: A-

A view to a spill

Quantum of Solace
Review by Nathan Weinbender

People will flock to a James Bond movie no matter what. Not even an obtuse title like “Quantum of Solace” will keep them away. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’re going to like this one all that much.

This is 007’s 22nd adventure, and the follow-up to 2006’s brilliant “Casino Royale,” which jump-started the withering series and inaugurated Daniel Craig as the first introspective, empathetic Bond.

Craig is, I think, perfect for the role. He has the same rugged appeal as the best of the Bonds, yet he approaches the role with a haunted vulnerability. His Bond is a refreshing change from the smirking ladies’ men of the past; he’s flawed, rough around the edges and deeply wounded, but he can still kick ass.

But here, Craig’s steely-eyed intensity feels hollow. He’s missing the depth and range of emotion he had in the last film—he broods and pouts and doesn’t say much, and the script never allows him to really command the screen.

I never thought I’d say this about Daniel Craig, but he really fades into the background.

The movie opens with a car chase in progress, followed soon after by a foot chase across the rooftops of Siena. Sounds thrilling, but the editing is overkill, often making it impossible to tell who is pursuing who and where and why.

Disappointing, especially if you remember how breathtaking that opening chase scene in “Casino Royale” was.

Bond’s nemesis this time around is Dominic Greene, played by the weasley Mathieu Amalric, the star of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” He’s the chairman of a corporation dedicated to “wildlife preservation,” but, of course, he has a dastardly plan that turns out to be much, much less imposing than world domination.

“Quantum of Solace” is the shortest film of the series, but it feels long and clumsy, with too many ideas, few of them very good, competing for attention.

The story is a mess, the villain unimposing and the editing often unintelligible—director Marc Forster has made some very good films—“Monster’s Ball,” “Finding Neverland” and the overlooked “Stranger Than Fiction”—but he seems to be in over his head here, shooting the action as though he’s being paid per jump cut.

And if you’re going to make a movie in so many exotic locales, let us see the scenery. The movie hops from Italy to Austria to Panama, and it hardly slows down to wow us with splendor of its locations. I imagine a documentary about the making of this movie would be more interesting than the movie itself.

Grade: C

Directed by Marc Forster. Written by Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. Starring Daniel Craig, Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Gemma Arerton and Jeffrey Wright. PG-13; 106m.

High hopes

Happy-Go-Lucky
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.” — J.M. Barrie

Yes, but is that sunshine always welcome?

Poppy, the heroine of Mike Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky,” certainly cannot keep her sunshine to herself, but she is so aggressively upbeat and unflinchingly optimistic that her sunshine can often turn into a storm cloud.

She is a primary school teacher in northern London who always sees the glass as overflowing. She lives to inflict her happiness on other people, and she doesn’t seem to recognize the hostility with which she is often met. Poppy is so bouncy and energetic that when her bike is stolen she laughs it off—“I never even got a chance to say goodbye,” she scoffs.

The missing bicycle inspires her to take driving lessons, and her instructor, Scott, is a real stick in the mud. He resents Poppy’s perkiness and grimaces a lot in her presence; when he’s finally pushed to the edge, he erupts, and his monologue reveals the darkness that is always lurking beneath the surface of Leigh’s films.

But plot summary doesn’t do the film (or any Mike Leigh film, for that matter) justice. It is not a story but a portrait. It features subplots that often lead nowhere, much like they do in real life.

Leigh is a great writer-director, and he typically explores the drudgery of lower-middle class life in Britain. Poppy is unlike any other character he has created, and this film works as an antidote to his earlier works—can you imagine Poppy encountering the back-alley abortionists in his “Vera Drake,” or David Thewlis’ vicious rapist in his “Naked?” I wonder if she could cheer them up.

Leigh rarely uses a complete script, instead allowing his actors to improvise and grow into their characters, and what Hawkins and Eddie Marsan, who plays Scott, do with their roles is astonishing—how fully they embody people who, at face value, seem like mere cartoons. They’re the reason the movie works so well.

Hawkins especially is completely captivating. She will probably rub some viewers the wrong way—I can say that if I were to encounter Poppy in the flesh, I would likely be irritated by her—but it’s a credit to her performance that she makes us fall in love with Poppy from the first frame.

Grade: A

Directed and written by Mike Leigh. Starring Sally Hawkins, Eddie Marsan, Alexis Zegerman, Kate O’Flynn and Samuel Roukin. R; 118m.

The title says it all

Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Review by Nathan Weinbender

The Weinsteins supposedly green-lit Kevin Smith’s new film based solely on its title. No script, no cast, just the title. Well, “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” does have a certain ring to it.

Zack is played by Seth Rogen, Miri by Elizabeth Banks. They’ve been best friends since grade school, and they live together in a rundown Pennsylvania apartment. When they’re strapped for cash and the power is shut off, they quickly jump to the only logical conclusion: They’ll make an adult movie. Of course.

They recruit the town’s weirdos and derelicts to assist them—Zack’s friend Delaney (Craig Robinson) is the financier, the guy who videotapes the local high school sports games (Jeff Anderson) is the director of photography, and the stars are a stripper (Katie Morgan), a prostitute (Traci Lords) and Jason Mewes.

There’s much drama concerning their locations—the warehouse they buy for filming is demolished and they’re stuck shooting n the coffee place where Zack works—and whether or not our hero and heroine, who have always had a platonic relationship, will do it on camera.

It’s all fairly predictable—that Zack and Miri will eventually realize they’re perfect for one another seems inevitable—but the charm of the film comes not from what Smith says but how he says it.

He’s a terrific writer, and his dialogue hasn’t crackled like this since “Chasing Amy.” His characters have collegiate vocabularies (especially when it comes to the names of bizarre sexual acts), they spout off pop culture references and geekisms, and they deliver crisp one-liners with hardly a stammer.

I’m sure no one in the real world speaks like this—no one, I suppose, except Kevin Smith.

But there’s color to his words, and he knows how to approach crudity from an intelligent angle. He’s helped greatly by Rogen and Banks, who deliver their lines with rat-a-tat immediacy—it’s like foul-mouthed Preston Sturges, or Howard Hawks with dick jokes.

I especially love how Rogen reacts when he meets a porn star who only appears in movies with all-male casts: “Like ‘Glengarry Glen Ross?’” A funny line, yes, but it’s made funnier because it’s a genuine question.

The movie, which plays like a hybrid of Judd Apatow and John Waters, was initially slapped with the NC-17, which isn’t a surprise, considering it features some of the frankest sexual dialogue I’ve heard in a mainstream film. But “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” has a sweet temperament, and its attitude towards sex is hardly exploitative.

In fact, the whole message of the film seems to be that sex without love is hardly sex at all. And when it comes time to shoot Zack and Miri’s big scene, it is so surprisingly touching that it might catch you off guard.

Grade: B

Directed and written by Kevin Smith. Starring Seth Rogen, Elizabeth Banks, Craig Robinson, Jason Mewes, Jeff Anderson, Traci Lords, Katie Morgan and Justin Long. R; 101m.

A mother’s intuition is never wrong

Changeling
Review by Nathan Weinbender

Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” is a film about faces. In a movie filled with strong performances, its most effective moments come when the actors contemplate their predicaments quietly and allow their facial expressions to do the talking.

It stars Angelina Jolie as Christine Collins, a switchboard operator in 1928 Los Angeles who comes home to find her nine-year-old son Walter missing. Five months later, the LAPD claims to have found the boy alive, yet they produce a child who most certainly is not Walter.

Watch in particular how Eastwood employs faces during that scene. He supplies us with a lingering close-up of the young boy as he gets off the train. Is this the same boy from scenes before? If not, they certainly look similar. And watch how creeping uncertainty plays across Jolie’s face—we understand exactly what’s going through her mind.

And later, when Christine tells Captain Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), the man in charge of her case, that the boy he brought back is the wrong one, he has her dismissed to the local sanitarium as a means of wiping the LAPD’s hands clean of the incident. But look at his face as Christine is dragged screaming from his office, as he stands alone by the window: He knows he’s made a mistake.

And notice how Eastwood and his cinematographer Tom Stern almost always cast faces in half-shadow. Not only does it give the film an unshakeable noir feel, but it casts a pall of doubt over every character in the movie: Who can we trust? Are they who they say they are? Are there other, darker ulterior motives at work?

It’s a marvel how seamlessly Jolie, who is one of Hollywood’s most recognizable actresses, fits into the film’s period atmosphere. Much like her criminally unheralded work in last year’s “A Mighty Heart,” Jolie plays a dignified woman, and she holds her composure, even when it contradicts her motherly instincts.

There is also some marvelous supporting work on display here: John Malkovich as a radio preacher determined to uncover police corruption, Jason Butler Harner as the man who may be responsible for Walter’s disappearance, Geoff Pierson as a no-nonsense prosecuting attorney, Amy Ryan as a prostitute who was thrown into the mental hospital because she threatened a cop with legal action after he beat her. It would be a travesty if all of these performances were ignored come Oscar time.

Eastwood is a no-frills filmmaker, and he allows his story to unfold simply. “Changeling” is a dark film, both devastating and maddening—devastating because this particular case ended with grisly discoveries, maddening because corruption and greed overtook the investigation and put a poor, defenseless woman through such travails.

But it is not without hope (it’s actually the last word spoken in the film), and Jolie is so good here that she almost doesn’t need to speak. It’s all in her face.

Grade: A-

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by J. Michael Straczynski. Starring Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan, Colm Feore, Michael Kelly, Jason Butler Harner, Geoff Pierson, Denis O’Hare and Amy Ryan. R; 141m.

“It’s Halloween. Everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”

Halloween
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Halloween” is the essential American horror film. No other movie in its genre has been as influential, as effective, as brilliantly realized.

Very few thrillers have ever been as economical as “Halloween,” and it serves as proof that carnage was not always at the heart of horror pictures. When so many directors focus one what horrible creatures will leap from the shadows, John Carpenter was more concerned with the lurking prospects of the shadows themselves.

“Halloween” was produced for just over $300,000 in the spring of 1978, and it went on to gross nearly $50 million at the box office, making it the most profitable independent film of its time. Why was it so successful? For the same reason, I think, that the haunted house at a carnival is popular—people respond strongly to being really, truly scared, and “Halloween” is very, very scary.

It is also one of the most stylish slasher movies ever, a fact made evident during the film’s opening moments, a long tracking shot that takes on the point of view of a young boy as he stabs his sister to death. Flash forward fifteen years, and the little boy, now grown, escapes from the confines of his mental institution and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween day.

The killer (simply credited as “The Shape,” he later became known as Michael Myers), donning a creepy white mask, begins to hack and slash his way through any teenager that gets in the way of his knife. Our heroine is a plucky Jamie Lee Curtis (making her feature debut), who is stuck babysitting two neighborhood kids as her promiscuous friends turn up dead.

On Michael’s tracks is Donald Pleasence, who was Michael’s childhood psychiatrist and knows what he is capable of. “Death has come to your little town,” he tells the sheriff, who brushes off the threats. It’s too late anyway.

Modern-day horror films relish violence and brutality, and so many directors wrongly assume that blatant sadism is automatically scary. Look at the “Hostel” and “Saw” series, in which the stories are constructed around the gruesome deaths, or the woeful remakes of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Halloween,” which drain the originals of their tension and practically splatter the camera with viscera.

So many scenes in “Halloween” would be easy to spoil with overbearing music, gratuitous gore or rapid-fire editing (all traits with which today’s moviegoers are no doubt familiar). But Carpenter is a master of his medium, and there are moments in this film that have been constructed so tightly that I can’t imagine them being any more effective.

Take, for instance, the famous moment near the end of the film where Curtis thinks she has killed Michael. Of course, he isn’t dead, and as she cowers in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, Michael—who has been lying inert on a bed over Curtis’ shoulder—silently sits up. Chilling.

I can think of at least a dozen modern directors that would supply that moment with a musical sting, or would cut to a close-up shot. It wouldn’t be necessary. Carpenter utilizes his camera superbly, and how he juxtaposes the main action in the foreground with glimpses of ominous figures in the background is one of the film’s great successes.

“Halloween” was the film that single-handedly inspired the boom slasher films in the ‘80s, and although it has spawned sequels, remakes, imitations and spoofs, none of them have captured the electricity that Carpenter did here. Most horror films are sledgehammers; this one is a scalpel.

Directed by John Carpenter. Written by Debra Hill and Carpenter. Starring Donald Pleasence, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles, Charles Cyphers and Nick Castle. R; 91m.

Two Liv Tyler movies in one day? Count me in!

The DVD Beat
Reviews by Nathan Weinbender

The Incredible Hulk
In 2003, Ang Lee made a noble effort to adapt “The Incredible Hulk” comic book series onto the big screen. The film’s visual style was remarkably good, but the story was dull, the drama turgid and the Hulk itself unimpressively rendered—it looked more like a Lump than a Hulk.

Now we have this sequel-of-sorts, which replaces the cast and director and has been retooled to be more of a straight-up summer blockbuster.

Edward Norton is a substitute for Eric Bana, and he’s a much better choice for the role of scientist-turned-science experiment Bruce Banner. As the film opens, Banner is living in secrecy in Brazil when he’s tracked down by a British mercenary named Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth). Blonsky has been assigned to capture Banner and hand him over to power-hungry General Ross (William Hurt), who has plans to siphon the Hulk’s power and use it to engineer an army of all-powerful superhuman soldiers.

Banner becomes a fugitive, reuniting with his old flame Betty (Liv Tyler), General Ross’ daughter. Naturally, he doesn’t want to be the Hulk anymore, but he’s forced to reconsider when Blonsky, who has been injected with a military-grade serum, has become an equally incredible mutant known as the Abomination.

This version of “The Hulk” is less ambitious than Lee’s version, but it’s more entertaining because of it. The special effects are better this time around, the action sequences have more oomph and the relationship between Norton and Tyler isn’t nearly as gooey.

And if you were curious, this movie finally resolves the mystery of Bruce Banner’s pants, which stay miraculously intact when he transforms into the Hulk: They have elastic waistbands.

Grade: B-

The Strangers
Rather than write a review for “The Strangers,” I’m tempted to simply direct you to a better film it very much resembles, a highly effective French thriller called “Them.”

Both movies begin with the same premise—a young couple in an isolated home is tormented and tortured by a group of masked killers—but whereas “Them” is stylish, scary and unpredictable, “The Strangers” quickly devolves into a depressing and pointless exercise in nihilism.

The young couple here are played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, and as the movie opens, their relationship is on the verge of disintegration. They’re staying in his parents’ vacation home, nestled so deep in the woods that if you were screaming for help…well, you know the drill. A trio of mask-wearing, knife-wielding psychos shows up and tries to slice and dice our protagonists, and what results is basically an extended chase sequence, with the good guys trying to outrun the bad guys and never getting anywhere

“The Strangers” has been made with a lot of skill, and the director, Bryan Bertino (making his debut), wrings a few legitimate scares out of this well-worn formula (there’s one particular shot—Tyler stands remote in the foreground as a masked man steps serenely out of the shadows in the background—that is absolutely masterful).

But once the flash of the opening scenes wears off, “The Strangers” falls back on rudimentary hack-and-slash elements we’ve seen time and time again, and Tyler and Speedman scream and cry their way through sequences that go from terse to sadistic as the script grows desperate for ideas.

Bertino has already mastered the superficial elements of moviemaking—he knows how to edit, score, light and frame a scene for maximum impact. He clearly has a future behind the camera; now let’s find him a competent screenplay.

Grade: C-

It stands for “whatever”

W.
Review by Nathan Weinbender

You never know what you’re going to get with Oliver Stone. He’s a gambler, a conspiracy theorist, a political revisionist, a provocateur. He’s also a hit-or-miss filmmaker, and his movies always carry a certain level of suspense: Will his tendencies to gleefully incite controversy work wonders, or will they blow up in his face?

Stone’s newest picture is “W.,” a biopic about President Bush, and if you were expecting an explosion, you'll be disappointed to know that the movie mostly just fizzles.

This movie works neither as a biopic nor as a drama. It’s too unfocused to be absorbing and glosses over too much pertinent information to be informative. Why Stone crammed such a momentous life story into a tidy two-hour package is beyond me—Bush’s uneasy journey from frat guy to Commander in Chief could easily supply enough material for a ten-part miniseries.

Stone’s portrait of our forty-third president is also curiously indecisive, and it never decides whether it wants to mock Bush or to present him as a martyr, whether it should be a serious examination of his administration or a jokey Mad magazine parody.

It begins in 2002, as Bush (Josh Brolin) and his cabinet prepare to go to war with the Middle East. We’re then transported to the ‘60s, when Bush is a young buck in a Yale frat house, and the film continually jumps back and forth from Bush’s formative years to modern day.

We watch as he struggles to gain the respect of his father, stops drinking and finds peace in Christianity, becomes Governor of Texas and eventually President Elect, and as Dick Cheney, like a contemptuous puppeteer, convinces him to invade Iraq for control of their oil reserves.

Well-known actors are cast as look-alikes for well-known heads of state—Elizabeth Banks is Laura Bush, Jeffrey Wright is Colin Powell, Toby Jones is Karl Rove, Ellen Burstyn and James Cromwell are Ma and Poppy Bush; Richard Dreyfuss is the weasley, calculating Cheney, who hunkers in the corner and flashes cynical grins, and Thandie Newton plays Condoleezza Rice with a crooked smirk that turns all of her cutaway shots into a punchline.

These characters feel like castaways from a bad “Saturday Night Live” sketch. They are broad-stroke caricatures, written to be the sum of their quirks, and they have about as much dramatic credibility as the real politicians’ phony TV personas.

Remember how effective Anthony Hopkins and Joan Allen were in Stone’s “Nixon,” or the resonance and vulnerability they brought to their roles? Or how intriguingly Stone weaved historical fact with possible fiction in “J.F.K.?” None of that happens here.

Maybe it has to do with timing—those films had the advantage of hindsight. “W.” is the first feature film to present a biography of a currently-seated president, and Stone’s attempts to be au courant don’t pay off. Because Bush is still in office, it’s impossible to know what aspects of his presidency will be considered important or historically significant down the line.

Will future generations perceive Bush the same way we do now? What effects will his administration have on them? Will they still be paying off our national debt ten years from now? Twenty years? Will future audiences understand the brief, unexplained re-creation of Bush’s pretzel-choking incident? Will a more comprehensive Bush biopic have yet been made?

But this question still remains: Is the film as fair and balanced as Stone purports? Not really. The script (written by “Wall Street” scribe Stanley Weiser) never attempts to truly understand Bush—it portrays him as a drunkard, a simpleton, a C-student with Daddy Issues, and the analysis never really advances beyond that.

Brolin’s performance is superficial, too. His Bush is a bumbling goofball with hardly any moral code. He asks silly questions like “Is our children learning?” and talks with his mouth full of food. He’s easily manipulated by Dick Cheney, and Laura just smiles and wrings her hands as he spouts off his ungainly rhetoric.

When the movie ends, our opinion of George W. Bush does not change, and we know nothing more about him than we did from the start. The final image of the film—a baseball being lobbed into the air and never coming down again—seems to not only adequately describe George W. Bush but also the movie that has been made about him.

Grade: C

Directed by Oliver Stone. Written by Stanley Weiser. Starring Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell, Richard Dreyfuss, Jeffrey Wright, Toby Jones, Ellen Burstyn, Thandie Newton, Scott Glenn and Bruce McGill. PG-13; 131m.