EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED (PG-13) Actor Liev Schrieber (The Manchurian Candidate) makes his directorial debut with this black comedy based on Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling novel about a Jewish-American writer traveling to Europe in search of family secrets. Elijah Wood heads up a crew of quirky characters, and the whole thing almost certainly gains in authenticity from having been shot on location in Prague. Also stars Eugene Hutz and Boris Leskin. (Not Reviewed)
FLIGHTPLAN (PG-13) Jodie Foster plays grieving aeronautics engineer Kyle Pratt, traveling home with her 6-year-old daughter, Julia, to bury her husband after his suicide. Onboard the plane, Foster awakens, panicked, to find her child missing. No one claims to have ever seen the girl and Pratt is assumed delusional and dangerous. Peter Sarsgaard plays the sympathetic air Marshal who attempts to help solve the mystery of the missing girl. With cool camera angles and intense close ups, the movie has an eerie, Twilight Zone-esque feel. Foster's usual command of raw emotion makes an otherwise blah film incredibly intense and thrilling. Also stars Sean Bean. ***
— Yeatie Morgan
THE FOG (R) A remake of a lesser-known John Carpenter horror outing (about pirate ghosts a tad scarier than the ones found in old episodes of Scooby-Doo), the 2005 edition of The Fog was made unavailable to movie critics until it was too late to review the thing in time for opening day. The studio's lack of faith in the film might just tell you as much as an actual review would. Stars Tom Welling, Maggie Grace and Selma Blair. (Not Reviewed)
THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED (PG) Actor turned filmmaker Bill Paxton makes quite a leap here, following his intensely disturbing 2001 directorial debut about religious fanaticism and serial killers, Frailty, with this heartwarming crowd-pleaser about the game of golf. More than that, though, The Greatest Game Ever Played is an underdog movie in the classic Disney mold, although it's anything but subtle in its aggressive use of golf as an arena for class struggle and the enormous divides between haves and have-nots. The movie has a tough time finding its focus and its footing for the first act, but it eventually settles into a fairly straight-forward account of the 1913 U.S. Open, in which Francis Ouimet (Shia LaBeouf), a 20-year-old amateur from the wrong side of the tracks, successfully took on a slew of seasoned professionals, most of whom Paxton casts as lackeys of the snooty, idle rich. Also stars Stephen Dillane, Josh Flitter and Elias Koteas. ** 1/2
GRIZZLY MAN (R) Werner Herzog, a cosmic absurdist who has always been drawn to obsessives and holy fools, seems to have found a perfect subject in the bizarre life and death of Timothy Treadwell, an environmentalist and self-appointed protector of wild life who died at the fangs and claws of one of his beloved grizzly bears. Treadwell was a bundle of contradictions, an insecure, aging nature boy and an overbearing (pun unavoidable), egomaniacal clown — think Queer Eye's Carson Kressley crossed with John Denver — who manufactured his own larger-than-life image and religiously committed it to videotape in hundreds of hours of self-shot footage. Herzog incorporates much of this footage into Grizzly Man, sometimes commenting upon it (in his amusingly foreboding German accent) as a way of shaping and expanding the story, but often simply letting Treadwell's words and actions speak for themselves. The results make for one of the best films of the year. ****
HAPPILY EVER AFTER (NR) Run of the mill kvetching about a bunch of middle-aged guys feeling trapped by marriage, work and life in general, and compensating by fantasizing about sex (and, in some cases, acting out those fantasies). The film happens to be French, but it's very nearly as shallow and clichéd as what you'd expect in an equivalent tale from Hollywood, and is only slightly redeemed by the presence of the always engaging Charlotte Gainsbourg (Serge's daughter) and a few tasty cameos by the likes of Johnny Depp and Anouk Aimee. The blame for this self-indulgent time waster can mostly be laid at the feet of writer-director Yvan Attal, who also co-stars as Gainsbourg's philandering husband, who acquitted himself much better in the similarly themed but somewhat more energetic My Wife is an Actress. Also stars Alain Chabat, Emmanuelle Seigner and Alain Cohen. **
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (NR) David Cronenberg's aptly titled movie begins and ends with the happy household of the Stall family, an all-American clan headed up by Tom (Viggo Mortensen) and loving wife Edie (Maria Bello), who considers him "the best man I've ever known." Cronenberg lets us know from the start that chaos is just a shot away, and the movie's calm is soon enough shattered by an act of extreme violence that turns Tom into a local hero. With fame comes unwanted attention, though, in the form of some unsavory out-of-towners (headed by a marvelously ominous Ed Harris) claiming that Tom is not the person he says he is. A History of Violence is tough to talk about without giving away crucial plot twists, but suffice to say that the film shoves our faces in the notion of violence as a transforming phenomenon, as alluring as it is appalling, and eventually focusing on a family bonding over blood. Also stars William Hurt. *** 1/2
