THE GOOD GERMAN (R) Director Steven Soderbergh indulges his inner rebel and his traditionalist side all at once here, meticulously co-opting the filmic language of 1940s Hollywood to create a somewhat self-conscious but beautifully crafted homage/deconstruction of classic postwar movies. Soderbergh sets his film in the hopelessly corrupt Berlin of1945 (closely mirroring the postwar Vienna of The Third Man), where American war correspondent George Clooney finds himself embroiled in a web of secrets, lies and extravagant coincidences, much of it revolving around a former flame Cate Blanchett. From its crisp black-and-white photography to its musical score (alternately lushly romantic and grand in ways that movie soundtracks don't allow themselves to be these days), to an ending straight out of Casablanca, The Good German nails the look and feel of those motion pictures of yore. There's something a bit grating about such extreme artifice, but there's food for thought here, too. As the title suggests, the film keeps circling around the difficulty of determining whose hands are clean, and what we get is an appropriately convoluted portrait of a morally dubious universe where there is no right or wrong — only those who survive and those who don't. Also stars Tobey Maguire, Beau Bridges and Tony Curran. 3.5 stars
THE GOOD SHEPHERD (R) For his second stint in the director's chair, Robert De Niro tackles a subject no less daunting than the birth and growth pains of the CIA and spans some four decades of world-shaking events. And still, amazingly enough, The Good Shepherd is a bore. The film moves at the proverbial snail's pace as it flips back and forth between time periods, none of which are handled with much flair. As if to compensate, it throws in some ostensibly crowd-pleasing dramatic mumbo jumbo about the main character's personal life — daddy issues, a soulless marriage, the girl who got away — before petering out with a predictable subplot about the identity of a double agent. The movie barely simmers for what seems like forever without ever really coming to a boil, and it all culminates in a Sophie's Choice moment that doesn't feel quite earned. Stars Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Michael Gambon, Billy Crudup, Alec Baldwin and Robert De Niro. 2 stars
THE HISTORY BOYS (R) Adapted from Alan Bennett's play of the same name, Nicholas Hytner's new film follows a group of very bright and very precocious English schoolboys trying to figure out how to get into Oxford. Stars Richard Griffiths, Stephen Campbell Moore, Frances de la Tour, Dominic Cooper and Samuel Barnett. (Not Reviewed)
THE HITCHER (R) A pair of college kids on a cross-country road trip deal with a mysterious, malevolent stranger (Sean Bean) who seems to have nothing better to do than make their lives a living hell. The filmic equivalent of the joke about the chicken crossing the road, here is yet another variation of the movie that will never die. Also stars Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton. (Not Reviewed)
LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (R) A staunchly humanist drama in the form of a war movie, Letters from Iwo Jima offers what is basically the reverse angle of Flags of our Fathers, a movie that barely allowed us a glimpse of the eyes behind the guns blowing holes in young American soldiers. Clint Eastwood returns here to the pivotal WWII battle that consumed his earlier film, but this time the director attaches faces to his invisible enemy, as well as names, histories and personalities, daring to turn former foes into human beings who weep and bleed. The two films are similarly structured as well: Both Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima mix extended and extremely graphic battle sequences with more serene, intimate moments (often in the form of somewhat awkward flashbacks) detailing the moral dimensions of their characters. In Flags, Eastwood focused on American soldiers falsely promoted as heroes, hammering home how war is packaged, sold and sanitized into a curiously bloodless symbol of patriotism. Letters concentrates on the flipside of the same equation: Japanese soldiers realizing they're being lied to by leaders who order them to die for a cause that's already lost. Both movies are ultimately mad as hell about the same exact thing: the idiocy of buying into illusions that governments try to impose on their people — and yes, the parallels with our current mess in Iraq are unavoidable. Stars Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, Tsuyoshi Ihara, Ryo Kase and Shindou Nakamura. 3.5 stars
