OPENING THIS WEEK
[RECOMMENDED] LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (R) Like George A. Romero’s horror classic Martin (1977), this Swedish shocker mixes vampire mythology with adolescent melancholy, and just as the earlier film was rooted in reality by its rundown Pittsburgh locations, this one draws heavily on its working-class setting, a drab suburb of Stockholm. Twelve-year-old Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) is bullied mercilessly at school and longs for a friend; one finally arrives in the person of Eli (Lina Leandersson), a pallid girl with a rumbling stomach who moves in next door. The boy begins to realize something is up when he slashes his palm to seal their friendship with a blood oath and she dives onto the floor to slurp up his drippings. The Scandinavian moodiness of the first half gives way to a series of jolting set pieces in the second, and as you might expect, the bullies get theirs in spectacular fashion. Tomas Alfredson directed a script by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapted his own successful novel. In Swedish with subtitles. —J.R. Jones
RECENT RELEASES
AUSTRALIA (PG-13) Seven years after Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann returns with this frothy historical romance set in his native land during the run-up to World War II. The story is a shameless knockoff of The African Queen, with Nicole Kidman, as white and perfect as a porcelain doll, arriving from the U.K. to take over her late husband’s ranch and Hugh Jackman, his mighty pecs glistening with sweat, helping her drive 1,500 head of cattle to market. Onto this narrative Luhrmann has grafted two interesting chapters from Australian history: the government’s mass relocation of mixed-race children to white families in the ’30s and Japan’s aerial bombardment of the Northern Territory in the days after Pearl Harbor. Luhrmann’s squirrelly, five-exclamation-point stylings mercifully subside after the first 20 minutes or so, leaving behind a palatable big-screen confection, and in keeping with the nationalistic good feeling, the cast includes such iconic Australian actors as David Gulpilil (Walkabout) and Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson (who costarred in Breaker Morant). —J.R. Jones
BEDTIME STORIES (PG) In this uneven Disney comedy Adam Sandler tones down his arrested-development persona, trading crass humor for warm fuzzies as a hotel janitor obliged to babysit his niece and nephew. To entertain them he improvises semiautobiographical bedtime yarns, to which the kids contribute their own improvements. The film comes alive at the half-hour mark when, as if by magic, some of their story inventions — like the sky raining gum balls — start materializing in their uncle’s daily life. Richard Griffiths best gets the antic spirit of this enterprise, relishing his multiple roles as Sandler’s phobic boss and several fantasy characters (a Greco-Roman emperor, a medieval king, a sci-fi potentate). Director Adam Shankman (Hairspray) shows an affinity for fractured fairy tales, but Guy Pearce and Lucy Lawless are miscast as Sandler’s nemeses. —Andrea Gronvall
BOLT (PG) Disney CGI animation about a canine TV star (given voice by John Travolta) who gets separated from his little-girl owner (Miley Cyrus) and must find his way home, assisted by a cynical alley cat and a wise-cracking hamster in a plastic globe. The movie recycles story elements from kids’ movies both recent (the 2007 turkey Firehouse Dog, about a lost celebrity pooch) and ancient (Disney’s 1963 live-action adventure The Incredible Journey, about a trio of animals on the road). Adults won’t find much to enjoy here, though the dog’s high-octane action series serves as a perverse parody of Jerry Bruckheimer-style summer blockbusters. Byron Howard and Chris Williams directed. —J.R. Jones
CADILLAC RECORDS (R) Like the still-unreleased Who Do You Love, this musical dramatizes the rise of Chicago’s legendary Chess Records, playing faster and looser with history than the other movie but also offering more marquee wattage. Founded by Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody) and his brother Phil (oddly omitted here), Chess transformed southern “race” music into urban blues and catapulted such artists as Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) and Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer) to fame, if not fortune. Later the company helped usher in rock ’n’ roll with crossover stars like Chuck Berry (Mos Def). The electrifying music helps camouflage the screenplay’s hyperbole. Darnell Martin directed; with Eamonn Walker, Eric Bogosian and a smoldering Beyonce Knowles as Etta James, who the movie implies had an affair with the married Leonard Chess. —Andrea Gronvall
[RECOMMENDED] THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON (PG-13) That rarest of breeds — the fantasy film for grown-ups. Director David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) and screenwriter Eric Roth (Forrest Gump) adapted this 159-minute feature from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jokey 1922 story about a man who’s born elderly and over the course of his life ages into a baby, but they’ve turned it into a gravely beautiful drama about the mysteries of aging and death. Brad Pitt (there’s tongue-in-cheek casting for you) plays the title character, whose stunning metamorphosis from codger to brat is accomplished through a combination of prosthetic makeup and digital manipulation. Cate Blanchett plays his one true love, and the story’s richest, darkest irony is that she and Benjamin are made for each other yet painfully mismatched for all but a brief period in their lives. With Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond, Jason Flemyng, Elias Koteas and Tilda Swinton. —J.R. Jones
THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (PG-13) With his fine solemnity and his vague air of being desperately uncomfortable in his own skin, Keanu Reeves is a perfect choice to play the preachy space alien Klaatu in this millennial update of the 50s sci-fi classic. Some popcorn never gets stale, and the opening stretch, when the visitor arrives on earth and blithely dresses down mankind, is great fun. But screenwriter David Scarpi has drained away much of the sentiment — even the little boy befriended by Klaatu treats him with fear and dread — and the original movie's climax, an endearingly corny homily about the necessity of peace, has been replaced by a pointless tsunami of digital effects. Scott Derrickson directed; with Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates, John Cleese, Jon Hamm, and Kyle Chandler. —J.R. Jones
[RECOMMENDED] DOUBT (PG-13) John Patrick Shanley adapted his own Pulitzer-winning play for this compelling drama about an archconservative nun (Meryl Streep) and a progressive priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) clashing in a working-class Bronx parish in 1964. Principal of the parish school, the nun suspects the priest of molesting a 12-year-old boy — the school’s first black student. Lacking any evidence and hamstrung by the church’s male-dominated chain of command, she embarks on a vendetta that leads her to the edge of a moral abyss. Shanley skillfully opens up the play’s action on-screen while preserving its ambiguity about the characters’ motives. Streep and Hoffman are pitch-perfect, and Amy Adams is also superb as a young nun caught up in the conflict. —Albert Williams
EAGLE EYE (PG-13) Working in the finest tradition of brain-dead blockbusters, director D.J. Caruso (Disturbia) and executive producer Steven Spielberg take a script riddled with absurdities and throw millions and millions of dollars at it. Two Chicagoans who don't know each other (Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan) are coerced into carrying out a terrorism plot by a mysterious and omnipotent organization that communicates with them by cellphones, manipulates their movements with split-second timing and controls almost every electrical device in their path, from security cameras to traffic lights to the scrolling LED screen in a travel office window. Caruso and Spielberg probably thought they were reviving the paranoid style of '70s political thrillers, but their story is so implausible it barely provokes a tremor. With Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Chiklis, Rosario Dawson, and Anthony Mackie. —J.R. Jones
FOUR CHRISTMASES (PG-13) Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon are San Francisco professionals who’ve spent three happy years together without ever meeting each other’s divorced parents. After heavy fog grounds their flight to Fiji, they’re forced to spend Christmas Day shuttling from one awful family gathering to another and another and another. Every holiday season brings at least one big-studio comedy about people who despise their relatives but finally accept, with a sigh, that family is what matters. This is marginally better than most, with a few offbeat comic ideas, a reliably droll performance from Vaughn, and, as the parents, four watchable old troupers in search of a fat paycheck (Robert Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Jon Voight, Mary Steenburgen). Seth Gordon (The King of Kong) directed. —J.R. Jones
[RECOMMENDED] FROST/NIXON (R) Peter Morgan’s hit play about the 1977 TV interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon makes for a punchy political entertainment, anchored by Frank Langella’s grand, mercurial performance as the angry ex-president. Frost relinquished any editorial control when he granted Morgan the rights to his story, and the movie is hardly flattering of him: It portrays Frost (Michael Sheen) as a glib entertainer unprepared for Nixon’s mind games and masterly obfuscations. But in contrast to the standard legend — that Frost became a real reporter, doing his homework and nailing Nixon on Watergate — Morgan has the temerity to suggest that Frost triumphed not in spite of his showmanship but because of it. Ron Howard directed, with outstanding support from Kevin Bacon as Jack Brennan, Nixon’s fierce chief of staff, and Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell as Bob Zelnick and James Reston Jr., Frost’s dogged researchers. —J.R. Jones
[RECOMMENDED] MADAGASCAR: ESCAPE 2 AFRICA (PG) In this nutty sequel to the 2005 Dreamworks 3-D animated hit, four best friends and former stars of the Central Park Zoo — a dancing lion (voiced by Ben Stiller), a rollicking zebra (Chris Rock), a lugubrious giraffe (David Schwimmer) and a hippo diva (Jada Pinkett Smith) — look forward to trading their current island residence on Madagascar for their old island home of Manhattan. But their return flight, piloted by the crackpot crew of Air Penguin, crash-lands on an African savanna, where the four are reunited with their own species. Lessons about family loyalty, tolerance, ingenuity and sacrifice add depth to the screenplay by Etan Cohen and directors Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, but thankfully don’t detract from the lunatic maneuvers of a delusional lemur king (Sacha Baron Cohen) and those wily spheniscidae. —Andrea Gronvall
MARLEY & ME (PG) John Grogan’s memoir about life with “the world’s worst dog” is the basis for this family picture directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada), who doesn’t consistently capture the book’s personable tone. Early on, the film exudes a frantic sitcom vibe as married journalists Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson endure a period of adjustment breaking in their hyperactive Labrador retriever. The story’s central part, in which the Grogans start a family, is strongest, as the stars effectively convey the stresses of juggling careers and child care. But the end, a drawn-out death scene is manipulative and, contrary to the movie’s feel-good marketing, likely to upset youngsters. With Eric Dane, Alan Arkin and Kathleen Turner. —Andrea Gronvall
[RECOMMENDED] MILK (R) Gus Van Sant’s biopic on Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California, is both timely and discomfiting, calling to mind currently unresolved gay rights issues, as well as flashing back to a time in pop culture many would just as soon forget. As Milk, Sean Penn gives one of the best performances of the year, and while the film makes clear what America lost with his assassination, it also gives short shrift to his personal life. Nevertheless, Milk is a reminder that the fight for the ideals its protagonist stood for is far from over. Also stars Josh Brolin, James Franco and Diego Luna. —David Warner
[RECOMMENDED] QUANTUM OF SOLACE (PG-13) A few years back, the easy sexism and narcissism of the James Bond series looked dated to the point of obsolescence, but Quantum of Solace proves that a revenge motive is just what’s needed to rejuvenate all the Bond cliches. In Casino Royale (2006), which introduced Daniel Craig as the British superspy, Bond found the girl of his dreams, learned that she’d betrayed him and watched her die horribly. The resulting anger and anguish propel him through this follow-up, providing an excuse for the requisite hyperbolic violence and casual seduction. These days a perfect Bond would be intolerable; a soulful, wounded Bond, though, can be forgiven anything, which makes this one of the franchise’s most coherent and watchable entries. Marc Foster directed a script by Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby) and Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. Also stars Olga Kurylenko, Mathieu Amalric, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini and Jeffrey Wright. —Noah Berlatsky
[RECOMMENDED] THE READER (R) A German teenager (David Kross) enjoys a steamy affair with a woman in her 30s (Kate Winslet) and discovers years later that during World War II she served as an SS guard at Auschwitz. Adapted from the novel by Bernhard Schlink, this Holocaust drama never rises above the norm in exploring the evil of the camps. But surrounding this central morality play is a more modestly scaled and emotionally persuasive story about a young man in love with a much older woman. Their bond endures into the late ’80s, when he’s middle-aged (and played by Ralph Fiennes) and she’s elderly; by that time, their relationship has undergone a painful role reversal, and the controlling, self-assured woman is the one who needs looking after. Stephen Daldry (The Hours) directed; with Bruno Ganz and Lena Olin, devastating as a concentration camp survivor who counsels an anguished Fiennes. —J.R. Jones
THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES (PG-13) A motherless 14 year-old girl (Dakota Fanning) and her family's fugitive housekeeper (Dreamgirls' Jennifer Hudson) runaway and find refuge in a Carolina honey farm run by a maternal beekeeper (Queen Latifah). In adapting the popular novel of the same name, director Gina Prince-Bythewood touches on the complexities of Southern racism in 1964. Despite some tragic plot points and fine performances, the excessive sunny tone, look and acting from Latifah ultimately smothers its serious intentions in a honeyed glow. —Curt Holman
SEVEN POUNDS (PG-13) Will Smith has fame, fortune, and a beautiful family, but that’s not enough — he wants you to know what a beneficent guy he is too. In this contrived hunk of feel-good he plays an IRS auditor who runs around doing extravagant good turns for people: He grants a delinquent taxpayer a six-month extension, moves a battered woman and her children into his vacant oceanfront home, even donates bone marrow for a dying man without asking for anesthetic. Of course, anyone this saintly must be atoning for some foul crime in his past, but when screenwriter Grant Nieporte finally discloses what it is after an endless tease, it hardly merits the character’s self-flagellation. Gabriele Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness) directed; with Rosario Dawson, Woody Harrelson, Michael Ealy and Barry Pepper. —J.R. Jones
[RECOMMENDED] SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE Could there be a bigger crowd-pleaser than a movie that combines rags-to-riches Bollywood melodrama with the TV phenomenon Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Scripted by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), this effervescent love story centers on a poor young man (Dev Patel) who's competing on the Indian version of the much-franchised quiz show. Each question triggers a flashback to his grim past on the streets of Mumbai, where he was torn between his survival-oriented brother and a defenseless girl, and these recollections lead to epiphanies that bring the young contestant ever closer to a multimillion-dollar jackpot—to the chagrin of the show's silky host (Anil Kapoor). The movie brushes against some of India's worst social ills, but it's essentially a fairy tale. Danny Boyle (Millions) and Loveleen Tandan directed; with Madhur Mittal, Freida Pinto, and Irfan Khan. —J.R. Jones
SOUL MEN (R) The late Bernie Mac had his last starring role in this soul-music reworking of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys; after a beloved singer (John Legend) kicks the bucket, his two backup vocalists from the ’60s (Mac and Samuel L. Jackson) agree to bury the hatchet long enough to drive cross-country in a pea green vintage Cadillac and perform in a tribute concert at the Apollo Theater. The movie separates cleanly into three different components: stilted raunch comedy, passable melodrama in which the singers meet the grown daughter (Sharon Leal) of a woman they both romanced back in the day, and buoyant musical numbers that give the two graying stars a chance to shake it, shake it, shake it. Mac was a magnetic performer with a long history of redeeming mediocre movies; unfortunately this is another one. Also stars Isaac Hayes, who also passed away after shooting was completed. —J.R. Jones
THE SPIRIT (PG-13) The influential comic book artist Frank Miller made his directing debut when Robert Rodriguez took him on as a partner for the movie version of Miller’s Sin City; flying solo now, Miller brings that movie’s hyperstylized noir visuals to an adaptation of Will Eisner’s classic superhero comic. With their dramatic angles, reverse silhouettes, bold production design and eye-catching combinations of desaturated tones and electric spot color, Miller’s comic book movies have redeemed the genre by honoring rather than mitigating the source material’s print-based artificiality. The bifurcation of image and story is even more pronounced here than in Sin City; I couldn’t care less where this was going, but I couldn’t look away either. Someone get this man a decent script. With Gabriel Macht, Eva Mendes, and, in the most entertaining scenes, Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson hamming it up as the villainous Octopus and Silken Floss. —J.R. Jones
TALE OF DESPEREAUX (G) Many of the charms of Kate DiCamillo’s best-selling children’s book are lost in this British animation by Dreamworks alumni Sam Fell (Flushed Away) and Rob Stevenhagen. Matthew Broderick gives voice to the title character, an adorable mouse with huge ears, and Emma Watson (of the Harry Potter movies) is the kidnapped princess he gallantly rescues, who looks like Mia Farrow. The imagery is colorful and artfully rendered, but the filmmakers, favoring technological wizardry over story, have beefed up the narrative with teeming rodent civilizations, a seafaring sequence and gladiatorial action pieces. With the voices of Dustin Hoffman, Tracey Ullman, Kevin Kline, Ciaran Hinds and Sigourney Weaver, who provides the arch and distracting narration. —Andrea Gronvall
TRANSPORTER 3 (PG-13) Buff and bald Jason Statham returns for another go-’round as the ass-kicking delivery man. This time, his package is a pale, freckle-faced young woman with the sort of bob haircut that must appeal to every Frenchman’s inner pedophile. Which makes sense, as this outing was coscripted by trash-n-flash director Luc Besson, whose The Professional fetishized a prepubescent Natalie Portman. (Not reviewed)
TWILIGHT (PG-13) If I were a vampire, I’d want to be like the ones in Twilight — they never get stakes hammered into them, they all look like models, they can hang out in the daytime (in fact sunlight makes their skin glisten like diamonds), and they make up the coolest clique in school, wearing hip clothes and strutting around in a pack. This adaptation of the best-selling novel by Stephenie Meyer never rises above the level of a teen soaper on the WB network, and its pale, sulky boy toys (Kellan Lutz, Peter Facinelli, Jackson Rathbone) are more silly than scary. Kristen Stewart is the heroine, who moves to a small logging town in Washington State and falls for pouty classmate Robert Pattinson; the director is Catherine Hardwicke, who debuted with the cautionary Thirteen and has been sliding ever since. —J.R. Jones
VALKYRIE (PG-13) Every good caper movie offers an assortment of vividly rendered conspirators, a requirement unfulfilled by the German postage stamps who populate this World War II adventure. Tom Cruise stars as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, the Nazi officer who led a plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944; the movie’s long-delayed release and the idea of Cruise stomping around in jackboots and an eyepatch have invited endless ridicule, but at least he’s fully invested in the project, which is more than one can say for the mercenary Brits propping him up (Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Terence Stamp). As a suspense movie, this works pretty well: director Bryan Singer (X-Men, The Usual Suspects) maintains a crisp pace as the plotters set out to kill the fuhrer with a briefcase bomb, and the historical details of the botched coup, which exploited one of Hitler’s own contingency plans to mobilize the army reserves and disarm the SS, are inherently interesting. —J.R. Jones
YES MAN (PG-13) JJim Carrey is a negative-minded loser who gets roped into a seminar with motivational guru Terence Stamp and emerges from it as a boy who can’t say no. This leads to numerous complications at home (his friends all take advantage) and at work (he’s a loan officer, naturally). But it also opens him up to life — in particular, scooter-riding wild child Zooey Deschanel. An interesting Atlantic column by James Parker posits the idea of Carrey as an existential hero, which might be more persuasive if his funniest moment here didn’t involve him pulling his face into a grotesque mask with adhesive tape. On the other hand, it’s nice to see a high-concept comedy with such a generous concept. Peyton Reed (Down With Love, The Break-Up) directed. —J.R. Jones
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2009.