Upcoming Releases
PREMONITION (PG-13) In what sounds a little too much like The Lake House Redux, Sandra Bullock foresees the death of a loved one and does whatever it takes to keep it from happening. The studio didn't screen Premonition in time for our review, but experience tells us that Bullock in mystical time-traveling mode is, charitably speaking, an acquired taste. Also stars Julian McMahon, Nia Long and Amber Valletta. Opens March 16 at local theaters. (Not Reviewed)
RECENT RELEASES
300 (R) We've come a long way from Final Fantasy, to the point where it's easy to forget that the digitally tweaked imagery washing over us in 300 is not, strictly speaking, real. The source here is a graphic novel by Frank Miller, and the sense that's imparted is that director Zack Snyder (rebounding nicely from his Dawn of the Dead remake) has imbued the panels not only with motion but also with life. An even more sophisticated blend of human actors and computer-generated environments than what was achieved in Miller's Sin City, 300's virtual universe recreates the battle of Thermopylae, when a small band of Spartan warriors held off a much larger army of Persians in 480 B.C. There's style to burn here and gore aplenty, as three hundred Spartan musclemen (resembling Tom of Finland fantasies in their red capes and black leather jock straps) take on hordes of fantastic and fearsome foes in a spectacle both elegant and unabashedly grisly. The movie is mainly notable for being an amazing technological achievement, but there's an actual story here as well (with some engaging characters and surprisingly smart writing), revealing 300 as something more than simply style for its own sake. Stars Gerald Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West and Rodrigo Santoro. 3.5 stars
THE ASTRONAUT FARMER (PG) Billy Bob Thornton stars as Charlie Farmer, a more or less ordinary man who — as is required in stories like these — dares to dream an extraordinary dream. Charlie's got an adoring wife (Virginia Madsen), two perfect children and a family farm to run, but it turns out that he once had dreams of being an astronaut, and what he really wants to do is to fly a rocket ship into outer space. That's why Charlie's going broke building that massive rocket in his back yard, and that's why the FBI is monitoring him and everybody in town thinks he's crazy. But of course, those of us in the audience are supposed to understand that he's anything but crazy, except in the best and most inspirational follow-your-dreams sort of way. For every interesting little bit of quirkiness there are two big, uplifting speeches complete with swelling Muzak ("Without our dreams, we're nothing"being the main mantra here), and the movie's pieces fall into place with a perfunctory thud completely at odds with the uplift the story strives for. Also stars Bruce Willis, Bruce Dern and Richard Edson. 2.5 stars
BLACK SNAKE MOAN (R) Everybody's got their demons in Black Snake Moan, beginning with Southern-fried nympho Rae (Christina Ricci, starved down to about 85 pounds, and playing her character like a cross between an anime sexpot and the tragic heroine of some white trash grand opera). Then there's the former rough-and-tumble blues singer reborn as a scripture-spouting tomato farmer — named, appropriately enough, Lazarus, and played by Samuel L. Jackson. When these two paths cross and Jackson makes it his mission to save Ricci's soul, the wanton white woman ends up at the end of a chain wielded by her aging African-American captor/benefactor. Despite the leering, pulp-ish veneer, writer-director Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) doesn't really take the movie into the kinky areas it seems to be promising, but neither does Black Snake Moan really fit the mold of a serious and sober character study. The film seems to exist in two separate worlds simultaneously — with lurid elements often played curiously straight, and serious dramatic plot points frequently given an outsized, overheated edge — but it's not fully either. The result is often fun to watch, but not completely satisfying. The best thing about the movie is its eye for authentic atmosphere, getting the back-roads juke joints, the ramshackle neighborhoods, the language and textures of Southern life just right. Also stars Justin Timberlake, S. Epatha Merkerson, John Cothran, Kim Richards and David Banner. Opens March 2 at local theaters.3.5 stars
BREACH (PG-13) Breach is the true story of FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen (Chris Cooper), who was arrested in early 2001 (an event that came to be overshadowed by 9/11) as a long-time spy for the Russians. By most accounts responsible for the most devastating security breach in American history, Hanssen wasn't your typical turncoat. He didn't seem to particularly care about the money, and he certainly didn't turn traitor out of some covert sympathy for Communist ideology. Oddly enough, in his way, Hanssen seemed to truly love his country. He was also a devout Catholic who berated staff members for not praying enough, even as he secretly immersed himself in Internet porn, strippers and homemade sex videos. Hanssen was, as should be abundantly clear, a complicated guy, and Cooper's performance — which is the best thing about Breach — does a fine job suggesting the tortured, unknown places where the man's complications dwell. Ryan Phillippe doesn't fare quite as well as Eric O'Neill, the FBI employee assigned to spy on Hanssen, and the script doesn't help by saddling him with some poorly motivated bits and pieces. Still, Breach manages to hold our interest as a competently made thriller, even if its telling winds up being a bit too conventional for such a curious subject. Also stars Laura Linney, Dennis Haysbert and Caroline Dhavernas. 3.5 stars
BREAKING AND ENTERING (R) This new movie by Anthony Minghella offers up a fussy, self-consciously artsy meshing of stories that feels far too similar to Babel and a dozen films just like it. Jude Law stars as a London architect with a depressed girlfriend (Robin Wright Penn), an emotionally troubled daughter and a life that becomes duly entwined with various characters from very different cultures and classes (including Vera Farmiga as a Russian hooker and Juliette Binoche as a Bosnian war widow). The characters are generally drab (Law), mopey (Penn), or little more than sketches (everyone else), and we feel the movie working overtime to orchestrate connections between them. Minghella's script merely piles on one emotional crisis upon another, without pausing to really sink its teeth into any of them, and Breaking and Entering winds up feeling both tepid and cluttered, more TV soap than the social-commentary-cum-metaphysical-statement it clearly wants to be taken for. Also stars Ray Winstone. 2.5 stars
DREAMGIRLS (PG-13) A uniquely African-American variation on that old Chicago razzle-dazzle, Dreamgirls lunges from one fabulous musical number to the next, a nearly nonstop hit parade with scattered bits of story thrown in during the downtime. Revolving around the rise of a girl-group called The Dreamettes (The Supremes by any other name), Dreamgirls attempts to tell the story of Motown, but it's all so slick and super-sized that it rarely resonates as it should. Ditto for the characters served up here, all of whom double as big, fat cultural icons in a flamboyantly superficial survey of what is arguably black music's most important decade. (For all the outsized drama, Dreamgirls often unintentionally comes pretty darned close to being soul music's Spinal Tap, minus the jokes.) What saves Dreamgirls is that its core performers — particularly Beyonce Knowles, Eddie Murphy and newcomer Jennifer Hudson — are talented and charismatic enough that, even when the material is bogus and the movie is just going through the motions, it's a pleasure to watch the singers and dancers vigorously strutting their stuff. Dreamgirls is mostly empty calories but, like most junk food, it's pretty hard to resist. Also stars Jamie Foxx, Danny Glover, Anika Noni Rose and Keith Robinson. 3 stars
GRAY MATTERS (PG-13) Starring as a brother-and-sister so sympatico that people mistake them for boyfriend and girlfriend, the deep-dimpled duo of Heather Graham and Tom Cavanagh (TV's Ed) spew rapid streams of wannabe-clever dialogue even flatter than what you'll hear on this season's Gilmore Girls. The real problems kick in about midway through, when Graham, to her astonishment, finds herself attracted to bro's new gal pal. What follows is so blatantly artificial, so thoroughly wrong-headed, that it's hard to keep from screaming at the screen. The movie's ingratiating sit-com sensibility spins out of control, unintentionally trivializing Graham as she flits around questioning her sexual identity with all the depth and intensity of a saucer-eyed smurf. Bits of calculated "zaniness" periodically materialize, and relief comes only when the closing credits appear. It's a bit like the coming-out episode of Ellen had it been written by Nora Ephron in the later stages of Alzheimer's. Also stars Bridget Moynahan, Sissy Spacek and Alan Cumming. .5 star
LAST KING OF SCOTLAND (R) Former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was one of the most colorful madmen in modern history, and Forest Whitaker, who is the main reason to see this movie, captures all of Amin's bluster and creepy pathos beautifully, from the smallest private insecurity to the most grandiose derangement. Painting a portrait of Amin through an outsider's eyes, The Last King of Scotland invents a hero — a young Scottish doctor named Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) — who becomes an insider in Amin's regime and then, having made his deal with the devil, proceeds to succumb to the considerable temptations of hell. Director Kevin MacDonald wants us to focus on how easy it is to be seduced by evil, so for much of the movie's running time we share Garrigan's cluelessness as to the extents of Amin's outrages. Only gradually do we begin to suspect the immense divide between the carefully mediated image and the barbaric reality of Idi Amin, and it's not until nearly an hour into the film that the real story begins to emerge. We don't begin to get the full measure of Idi Amin until a bit too late in the game in The Last King of Scotland, but when the movie finally plays its hand, it's the real deal. Also stars Kerry Washington, Simon McBurney and Gillian Anderson. 3.5 stars
THE MESSENGERS (PG-13) A city couple (Dylan McDermott and Penelope Ann Miller), complete with cherubic toddler and disaffected teen daughter, move to a secluded farmhouse — where, in the tradition of these sorts of movies, bad things begin to happen, pretty much as you'd expect them to. Creepy sounds go bump in the night, mysterious stains appear that just won't wash away, moldy apparitions appear to be scuttling up walls and across ceilings, and every few scenes or so there's a very loud noise or shock cut specifically designed for no purpose other than to say "Boo!" Oh yeah, and then there's that lone locked room that appears to be the epicenter of evil, at least one character who becomes demonically possessed and a grand finale in which the house inevitably goes all Amityville on everyone's asses. We might be able to forgive the blatant cut-and-paste nature of The Messengers, which is the English-language debut from Asian horror auteurs Danny and Oxide Pang (Bangkok Haunted, The Eye, Re-Cycle), but this would all go down a lot easier if it at least had the stylistic chops of the directors' previous efforts. Also stars John Corbett and Kristen Stewart. 2 stars
MUSIC AND LYRICS (PG) Hugh Grant stars as Alex, a self-described "happy has-been" who enjoyed brief fame in a '80s pop band and now finds himself reduced to playing high school reunions. Drew Barrymore, assuming a role that a few years ago would have gone to Meg Ryan, plays a lovably neurotic ditz named Sophie. Alex and Sophie meet cute within the film's first 10 minutes, then wind up spending time together to collaborate on his big comeback song. And it's pretty much a given that by the time their brief artistic partnership comes to its conclusion, romantic sparks will have flown. And does it ever — in the hothouse bubble of Music and Lyrics, Alex and Sophie are veritable fruit flies of love, with a relationship that flourishes with all the prepackaged, just-add-water gusto of a packet of sea monkeys. A feel-good comedy coasting on featherweight charm, Music and Lyrics is not quite Two Weeks Notice pointless (another rom-com starring Grant and from the same director, Marc Lawrence), but it's certainly nowhere near Four Weddings and a Funeral smart, or even Notting Hill clever. Still, Grant and Barrymore are both appealing performers (even though their chemistry together doesn't exactly set the world on fire), and just the presence of their company is enough to make Music and Lyrics a bearable experience. Also stars Brad Garrett, Kristen Johnston, Campbell Scott and Haley Bennett. 2 stars
NOTES ON A SCANDAL (R) A fierce performance by Cate Blanchette and an even more remarkable one by Judi Dench are the main reasons to see Notes on a Scandal, a solid little thriller that has something bad to say about nearly all of its characters. Blanchette stars as Sheba Hart, a greenhorn teacher who gets taken under the wing of veteran instructor Barbara Covett (Dench), an oddball spinster whose affection for the younger woman goes from creepy to deadly. Blanchett's character is no angel either, and her steamy affair with one of her 15-year-old students only complicates the film's nasty turn of events and snowballing head games. In the end, the film doesn't really amount to much more than a retooled and interestingly textured variation on your basic Fatal Attraction cat-and-mouse, but some of the twists and turns are surprisingly effective, and Dench and Blanchette are a pairing made in cat-and-mouse heaven. Also stars Bill Nighy. 3.5 stars
THE NUMBER 23 (R) Jim Carrey is back in serious thespian mode and with Kevin Bacon's hair. But that's not the worst news about The Number 23, a turgid and largely pointless psychological thriller from hit-and-miss director Joel Schumacher (Batman Forever, Phone Booth). In what might be charitably taken as a subversive nod to Ace Ventura, Carrey stars an ordinary dog-catcher who fantasizes that he's some sort of tough-guy sleuth (a pet detective, get it?), when he begins to identify a little too closely with the very strange book he's reading. As Carrey's character becomes increasingly obsessed with the book and with its quasi-mystical fixation with the titular numeral, his paranoia grows to Shining-like proportions, a falling-off-the-deep-end that begins almost immediately and leads nowhere particularly interesting. The movie begins spending more and more time in Carrey's head, a soft-focus fantasy world in which the character's faux-noir alter-ego gets to sport stubble and elaborate tattoos, and have rough sex with a series of women in bad wigs. The fantasy interludes are unintentionally dopey, the descent into madness deadly dull, and the omnipresent voice-over narration that supposedly holds the narrative together is annoyingly overwrought and sometimes flat-out pretentious. Also stars Virginia Madsen, Logan Lerman, Danny Huston and Lynn Collins. 2 stars
PAN'S LABYRINTH (NR) Besides functioning as a brutally incisive account of life during wartime, Pan's Labyrinth is something of a fairy tale, a classic fable shaken and stirred with a modern twist (including a wicked, obsessive-compulsive stepfather, a trio of tasks to be completed before the moon is full and a bionic-insect fairy for a guide). The movie is also an elegant coming-of-age tale, taking place during the final days of the Spanish Civil War, and filtering that conflict through the imagination of a 10-year-old girl who absorbs the messy suffering into a richly ordered fantasy world of her own device. Taking us down the rabbit hole and straight through the looking glass, Pan's Labyrinth layers its real-world wartime drama with glimpses of a parallel universe where anything is possible, where pagan myth and Jungian symbols collide and magical realism mixes freely with grotesque imagery straight out of Goya. The film is a fairy tale in the best and darkest sense (a baby-killing, eyeless monster dining by an enormous pile of tiny shoes is just one of its terrible pleasures), so be aware that this is most decidedly not, repeat not, an entertainment for children. Stars Sergi Lopez, Maribel Verdu, Ivana Baquero, Ariadne Gil and Alex Angulo. 4.5 stars
WILD HOGS (PG-13) In Wild Hogs, four suburban guys, each suffering the slings and arrows of midlife crisis, hoist their aging carcasses on motorcycles-cum-phallic-symbols and set out on a cross-country road trip to rediscover their old mojo(s). It's not a particularly good movie or a particularly funny one (did I forget to mention it's a comedy?), but Wild Hogs coasts comfortably on the likeability of its cast — John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy — each riffing on familiar aspects of their respective screen personae. The humor here is mostly physical and of a lower-brow variety (characters frequently injure themselves and others, make funny faces in the shadow of emotional or material loss and deal with massive feces spillages, literally). to the movie's credit, there's a blithely cheerful quality to even its most potentially cruel bits that, like a vintage Road Runner cartoon, keeps Wild Hogs from feeling mean-spirited. Even the obligatory soundtrack of classic road songs is a tad less annoying than you might imagine. At least I don't think I heard "Born to be Wild" in there. Also stars Ray Liotta and Marisa Tomei. 2 stars
ZODIAC (R) Nobody does serial killer movies like David Fincher, and Fincher's Zodiac is a serial killer movie unlike any other — including his own. Eschewing the dank, velvety atmospherics and formidable stylistic flourishes of the director's own esteemed Seven (and most of his other previous work), Fincher fashions Zodiac in a surprisingly straightforward and frill-less manner, evoking the look and feel of a 1970s time frame without slavishly fetishizing it. Even more crucially, Fincher subverts our expectations of where the meat of the movie should lie, giving us a film where the thrill of the chase takes a back seat to red tape and blind alleys. There's a lot of cross-chatter and seemingly pointless tail-chasing here, but that in fact becomes crucial to what the film's all about. A police procedural distilled to its cold, bureaucratic essence, Zodiac immerses us in a process that's more nerve-wracking nuts and bolts than car chases and titillating madmen, ultimately positioning the movie much closer to something like All the President's Men than Silence of the Lambs. The periodic murder sequences pack an undeniable wallop, but the vast majority of Zodiac plays out in the cluttered newsrooms and drab offices where loosely connected groups of curiously faceless journalists and cops endlessly debate the details driving their case. With no real heroes (the focus rarely settles too long on any one individual) and a villain who's more of a MacGuffin than a palpable personality, Zodiac is easily the most perverse mainstream entertainment in ages. In the end, virtually every one of its obsessed good guys winds up down for the count, drowning in the same ocean of frustration that did in Gene Hackman in The Conversation. Stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey, Mark Ruffalo, Anthony Edwards and Brian Cox. 3.5 stars
This article appears in Mar 14-20, 2007.