New Movie Review: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

Sidney Lumet has directed some of the finest films of all time, among them 12 Angry Men, Network, and Dog Day Afternoon. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead may not be of the same caliber as these other movies, but it is still a damn fine film. Tense and claustrophobic in all the right ways, Lumet's crime thriller hearkens back to the kind of non-linear heist movie that Tarantino popularized with Reservoir Dogs.

Kelly Masterson's script, her first, is a masterclass, intricately weaving the details of a heist, an affair, and a dysfunctional family all into one seamless plot that never seems to wander despite taking many detours. Beginning with the ending, Masterson gives us the story of two brothers, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke, who plan to rob their parent's jewelery store, but things go terribly wrong when they discover their mother working there. Marissa Tomei plays Hoffman's wife and Hawke's girlfriend. As the film builds to its bloody climax, hidden motives are unearthed and old wounds are reopened.

Hoffman is as brilliant as ever playing the smarter, more successful, more confident of the brothers. Hawke is, at times, overmatched, but there are glimpses of the potential we've known about since Training Day. However, most impressive here is Albert Finney as the boys' father and the owner of the jewelery store in question. His relentless pursuit of the robbers is heartbreaking, made all the more sad because we know how it must end.

The plot moves back and forth with details of the robbery and its aftermath shown from every possible point of view. The lightning fast edits contrast nicely with the calm steady camerawork, both of which give the film an authentic documentary style feel. The devestation we experience as an audience is enhanced by this realism and by the fact that, perhaps save for all the blood, the story could be the story of any family, even our own, that must struggle with lost hopes and shattered dreams.

See it.

Yes.

New Movie Review: Lions for Lambs

Redacted. Rendition. In the Valley of Elah. The Kingdom. Lions for Lambs. Grace is Gone. This year seems determined to be the year of the Iraq War film, and Robert Redford's new political "thriller" is the perfect example of what separates a good film, such as Paul Haggis' Elah, from a mediocre film. And, make no mistake, Lions for Lambs is a fantastically mediocre film.

The triple story revolves mostly around Meryl Streep as a journalist interviewing a U.S. senator played by Tom Cruise. They discuss the senator's new plan of action in Afghanistan as we the audience watch the effects of that strategy on two young soldiers trapped on a mountain top. Redford shows up as a professor lecturing an intelligent but lazy student with misplaced values. It is all handled very matter-of-factly, which is a nice way of saying that it is boring beyond belief. What we have is a story of political intrigue that forgets to be intriguing or even entertaining. And, in the absence of the former, the absence of the latter is unforgivable.

Writer Matthew Michael Carnahan takes the easy way out at every opportunity, and instead of engaging the audience in an intelligent, important conversation, he gives us a one sided lecture on righteousness and morality. The complexity of the issue is completely sapped away, and we are left with good guys on white horses and bad guys so simply drawn that they may as well be wearing funny hats. The writing in this film is so terribly pointed that no one in the audience gets to have a thought. Every idea is hammered home so incessantly that any subtlety or intelligence that may have been there is bled completely dry.

This is the first film for the new Tom Cruise-helmed United Artists, and for his first feature, Cruise picked the kind of high-minded, liberal (not usually a dirty word but here a slur), prestige picture that seems meant only to win awards. That is not necessarily a bad thing, depending upon your perspective, and this film had every chance to prove itself worthy of winning those oh-so coveted awards. However, it seems like a lot of talented people brought their B-game to a C-movie.

Robert Redford does what he can with the little he is given, but there is a problem when the best thing about a movie is that it clocks in at under an hour and a half. This picture is truly cringe-worthy. It plays like a Berkeley film student's senior thesis: pseudo-radical ideology made blatantly obvious by a lack of interesting set pieces and a lot of people shouting without saying anything. Sadly, what the whole endeavor boils down to is ham-handed propagandizing that seeks not to understand and interpret but to proselytise and convert.

See it?

No.

New Movie Review: Michael Clayton

Michael Clayton is the best movie of the year so far. Every element of this film succeeds on the highest level of the craft of film making. The writing is spot on, the direction is graceful, and the acting is top notch. This is one of those rare instances where the stars seem to have aligned to make the near impossible: a perfect film.

It is not without its flaws. It can tend to drag on in the middle, but the wait only makes the denouement that much greater. There are small things here and there. They are what Roger Ebert would refer to as the minor flaws in a masterpiece that make it human. And, writer-director Tony Gilroy's film is nothing if not brimming with humanity.

That is the greatest conflict here: the clash between those with a conscience and those without. George Clooney has never been better playing Michael Clayton, a law firm "fixer", mopping up his company's messes. He stumbles into a spider web of secrets and deceit when his friend, the magnificent Tom Wilkinson as Arthur Edens, has a crisis in wrestling with his own demons of morality.

It becomes the proverbial race against the clock as the walls begin to come crumbling down around Michael, and his options start to run dry. Clooney handles the role with suave and daring and just the right amount of paranoia. Pitted against him is the firm for which he supposed to be working, personified by a wonderful Sydney Pollack, and the company that has hired them, represented by Tilda Swinton. Like Faye Dunaway in Network, Swinton is remarkable, and sometimes frightening, as woman who has lost any sense of decency and will stop at nothing to come out ahead of the situation.

If the Academy does not recognize this film with at least a few Oscar nominations (Wilkinson should be a lock), then at least in this reviewer's opinion, they will have much for which to answer. This may be the best legal thriller ever made. The heart-pounding final act is the most exciting movie going experience of the year. Gilroy has much to say about morality and the conscience but never forgets to tell an intriguing, wonderfully nuanced story of truth, lies, and the people who control both.

See it?

Yes.

New Movie Review: The 11th Hour

There are some movies, Casablanca and The Godfather come to mind, which you should see if you are a fan of movies at all. However, there are some movies, like Schindler's List and Nuit et Brouillard, that you should see because you are human being alive on this planet. The 11th Hour belongs in the latter category.

The Leonardo Dicaprio produced documentary takes a universal look at the problem of global warming, a topic brought into popular culture by Al Gore's Oscar winning documentary from last year, An Inconvenient Truth. The film has the talking head style of so many post-Errol Morris documentaries. In fact, it is a fairly conventional film; but for once, the film art is secondary to the subject matter.

It is not the most well made documentary, but it is effective in as much as it is scary as hell. Expert after expert is brought before the camera to explain what we should already know: our planet is dying, it is our fault, and time is running out. The first hour takes the sort of pessimistic doomsday stance that a documentary like No End in Sight does.

However, The 11th Hour succeeds where lesser documentaries, like No End in Sight, fail. It does not simply present a terrible problem and call it an insurmountable obstacle or refer to it as something that happened that can no longer be helped; The 11th Hour presents real, scientific, technologically based solutions to the problems it presents. The film does not leave us feeling helpless and lost. On the contrary, we are empowered.

Despite the frightening facts presented in the first half, the overall tone of the film is hopeful. The aforementioned experts not only give intelligent descriptions of what is happening, but they posit advice and steps on what we can do to correct it. Few films fall into this category, but this is essential viewing. As a human being alive on this planet, it is essential.

See it?

Yes.

New Movie Review: Elizabeth, The Golden Age

This movie is overblown, unfocused, and self-congratulatory. It has nothing interesting to say about anything we do not already know. Anyone who has taken a high school world history class will know how it turns out, and anyone who cares about historical accuracy will be sorely disappointed. It suffers from poor writing, heavy-handed direction, and an unnecessarily flashy production.

It is a historical romance in the vein of films like Cleopatra and Shakespeare in Love. The love story here, however, makes no sense. It is not believable because we know these people will never be together, and we do not care because these people do not seem to love each other that much anyway. The romance hinges on a preposterous love triangle that is more of a straight line through Walter Raleigh, played by Clive Owen.

Cate Blanchett, returning for a second go at depicting the Virgin Queen, plays Elizabeth on the cusp of a holy war with Spain; however, she becomes preoccupied with Raleigh's charm and sense of adventure. Blanchett does fine work, but we've seen this character before, and like the overdone sets and annoyingly anachronistic music, it seems quite unnecessary. Owen is always good, but he just seems bored with the meandering plot line and nonsensical character arcs. Abbie Cornish plays the woman for whom Raleigh falls, and she is passable but not spectacular.

There is nothing really spectacular here at all. Under normal circumstances, that would not be a fair criticism, but this movie tries so hard to impress the audience that it just overwhelms us with too much of something that is not that good of a thing. It is showy and grandiose in all of the worst possible ways. It retains none of the passion and grace of the first film and has so much style that the little substance it does have is lost or unimportant. Director Shekhar Kapur would have been better off settling for the success, on just about every level, of Elizabeth and not trying to recapture it with this far inferior effort.

See it?

No.

New Movie Review: We Own the Night

An official Cannes Film Festival selection this year, We Own the Night is a pretty straight-forward cop drama. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man torn between obligations to family and to business. Mark Wahlberg and Robert Duvall play his brother and father, respectively. They are police officers assigned to the very division that would seek to undermine Phoenix's business. That business involves drug deals out of the night club he runs. It seems that Russians are the organized crime go-to culture this year (see Eastern Promises), as it is a Russian crime family behind all of the dealings in said nightclub.

This is the basic set-up for a movie that feels pretty similar to a lot of other police movies put together. It does not have the humor of a Lethal Weapon movie or the heart pounding thrills of a police procedural like Zodiac. It lacks the visceral energy of The Departed, a movie to which it has been compared quite a bit. I am not sure that I really see the comparisons, but you can judge that for yourself.

There are few nice set pieces, like a rain soaked car chase at about the mid-way point and some hazy moments near the end. However, writer-director James Gray (Little Odessa and The Yards) never holds the tension long enough for the audience to get the effect he wants us to. It is rare that a movie is too short, but We Own the Night would have benefitted from a few extended sequences. Instead, Gray opts for the immediate thrill, which is often less satisfying and sometimes too easy.

Duvall and Wahlberg give solid performances, and Eva Mendes is fine as the wishy-washy girlfriend. But, the movie rests almost entirely on the shoulders of Joaquin Phoenix. His is the story we follow, and he is the one about whom we care. He has shown, most notably in Walk the Line, that he is perfectly capable of carrying a movie, and he does an admirable job here. He is able to overcome much of Gray's shaky, uneven writing and pulls a solid performance out of an average movie.

Fans of the genre will enjoy this film. Fans of Joaquin Phoenix will enjoy this film. People who are neither of those will probably not. There is nothing terribly new or interesting here. It may be better to rent any one of the various police movies from the mid to late eighties that this film seems to model itself after so much. However, is it a worthy addition to that class of film? Yes.

See it?

Yes.

New Movie Review: Feast of Love

Robert Benton directed the 1979 best picture winner Kramer vs. Kramer. After viewing Feast of Love, that is hard to believe. Working from an overly-meditative and underdeveloped script by Allison Burnett, Benton delivers a movie so sappy and bland that one wonders if this wasn't originally planned for a primetime release on the Lifetime Network (where it probably would have done quite well).

I would summarize the plot here if it were intelligible and if I thought it served a purpose. The point of a plot is usually to tell some story (hopefully an interesting one, though not always as is the case here) at the end of which characters learn something or are changed in some way. Burnett's script does not seem too concerned with providing its characters with motivations or real thoughts, and their character arcs flatline from the beginning. But, it's okay because we never really learn who these people are anyway, and the ones we do learn about we do not like. So, we do not care.

Morgan Freeman phones it in playing (for a change) the wise, world weary mentor to a group of people with problems (see The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby). Greg Kinnear does the best he can with what he's given to work (and it ain't much). This is basically true of the whole cast: talented people playing an ensemble of uninteresting and occasionally downright annoying stock characters who are put in a series of increasingly ludicrous situations.

The movie has no redeeming qualities, and for their own sakes, I hope everyone involved got paid upfront.

See it?

Only if the alternative is bamboo slivers under the fingernails, and even then, weigh your options.

New Movie Review: In the Valley of Elah

Paul Haggis, writer-director of the best picture winning Crash, goes for an even higher political mark with his latest film, In the Valley of Elah, and he hits his target right on the money. The film revolves around a father, played with gravity and sincerity by Tommy Lee Jones, and his search for answers in the death of his son. The movie follows the basic guidelines for a procedural film (see: All the President's Men or this year's Zodiac) but dares to go beyond a simple exploration of beurocracy or of systems. Instead, Haggis' film becomes an intense character study in the guise of a procedural.

It would seem that Tommy Lee Jones is in the midst of a career resurgence after turning in some fine work in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and the upcoming No Country for Old Men. His brilliantly understated performance anchors a film that teeters on sentimentality, as Haggis' films so often do, but Jones holds strong at the centre and keeps the focus of the story where it belongs: on the criminal investigation. Jones' choice to not play up his feelings allows the audience to draw its own conclusions, and we still come out feeling how Haggis would have wanted us to feel anyway.

Charlize Theron plays a female detective dealing with sexism in the workplace in a minor subplot that is never really fleshed out, but that is to the benefit of the film. She is strong-willed and intense but with just enough heart showing through that we believe she truly wants to help this man. Susan Sarandon is devastating in the few scenes that she has, and with almost no words at all, she conveys all of the hurt and loss that her character experiences. The rest of the ensemble cast play most mostly army and police personnel, and all bring their A-game. However, the show really belongs to Jones' grieving but determined father.

He is the beating heart at the core of this film. We sympathize with him and can understand every move he makes. Haggis' writing, while sometimes a little on the head, is wonderfully restrained here, and he simply allows the facts of the case to carry the story forward. The writing, coupled with Tommy Lee Jones' performance, do well to keep the film grounded just left of centre, when it very easily could have gone off on an overtly leftist political bent. The great success of the film is that it alienates no one but is still able to convey a very important message about the condition in which our world finds itself.

See it?

Enthusiastically, yes.

New Movie Review: The Bourne Ultimatum

This is supposedly the final film in the series, and if so, it wraps up the trilogy nicely. Fresh off the success of his tremendous, if controversial, film United 93, for which he received an Oscar nomination, Paul Greengrass is back for his second Bourne-film. In what may come to be known as the year of the three-qual, after seeing the release of the third Pirates movie, the third Spiderman and the third Shrek, The Bourne Ultimatum stands head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd.

It is an intense, spy thriller filled with the same intrigue and action that drew audiences to the first two installments. Greengrass' trademark handheld camera is the perfect fit for this kinetic film that hardly slows down to explain itself and, yet somehow, never leaves the audience questioning the motives of anyone, least of all Jason Bourne.

Reprising his role as the earnest, amnesiac CIA operative is Matt Damon who gives a fine performance, managing to look comfortable but never boring in the skin of what some are calling the "American Bond". He is at once icy cool and frantically desparate as he seeks to outwit his nemises at the CIA, here played by David Strathairn in a wonderfully understated supporting performance.

In the end, The Bourne Ultimatum delivers on every promise that it makes: it is a gripping thriller, an intriguing spy game mystery, and contains some wonderful chase scenes through streets of major world metropolises. It is a popcorn flick with a magnificent pedigree and is a worthy addition to the genre.

See it?

Yes.