THE NEW WORLD (PG-13) Terrence Malick may be the unofficial poet laureate of American cinema, but his latest film often feels fluid to the point of formlessness, a series of gorgeous landscapes for its characters to wander through. The setting is 1607 Virginia, and what the filmmaker is showing us is that historical moment when Native American and European cultures first collide, a cataclysmic event filtered through the celebrated cross-cultural romance of John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher). The love story helps ground things, but The New World's naïve mythmaking and metaphysical meandering is still a touch-and-go proposition. Walking a fine line between mesmerizing and monotonous, the film revels in long, trance-like passages complete with whispering choruses of multiple voices layered over the fray. Malick is so consumed with poetizing the sublime tragedy of it all that he forgets about basic minimum requirements for engaging an audience, such as coherency, conciseness, and the little matter of that love story he promised to tell. Also stars Christian Bale and Christopher Plummer. 2.5 stars.
RUMOR HAS IT (PG-13) Rob Reiner produces another romantic comedy with a moderately witty storyline. Jennifer Aniston stars as Sarah Huttinger, an obituary writer and emotionally distraught bride-to-be who learns that her family was the inspiration for the novel and film The Graduate. After certain parental possibilities come to light, she goes searching for Beau Burroughs, an ex-lover of her deceased mother and living grandmother (played by none other than Shirley MacLaine). Despite a promising start and sporadically hilarious moments, a rushed conclusion makes Rumor Has It merely average. Also stars Kevin Costner and Mark Ruffalo. 2.5 stars.
Adam C. Capparelli
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (R) The year's most meticulously detailed, deeply personal and magnificently neurotic account of a family splitting apart at the seams. The family members are a bright, talented bunch headed up by a mother and father (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) who are both writers, one whose star is rising, one with a star seriously falling, and whose marriage is well on the way to its messy end. That doesn't translate well for the two Berkman boys — 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline) and older brother Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) — as they struggle with the gravitational pull of screwed-up, hyper-intellectual parents and adjust to the unpleasant, absurd realities of divorce. The Squid and the Whale is a delicate film about people who are often brutally honest, with director Noah Baumbach managing to find something appealing and even endearing in characters who are frequently selfish, arrogant and flat-out pretentious. Also stars William Baldwin and Anna Paquin. 4.5 stars.
SYRIANA (R) A film that attempts to be the last word on that scariest of unholy trinities — oil, money and blood — Syriana sometimes seems less like a political art-film and more like a thinking man's horror movie (think Land of the Dead with less cannibalism and where the zombies are rewritten as CIA agents). Writer-director Stephen Gaghan, screenwriter of Steven Soderbergh's similarly timely Traffic, throws together an almost unmanageable ensemble of some two dozen characters, from American politicians and oilmen to Arab sheiks and suicide bombers, in an ambitious attempt to offer up a mosaic of the enormously complicated forces (economic, religious, cultural, etc.) fueling immoral acts on both sides of the ongoing War on Terror. There's much that's thought-provoking and even important about Syriana, but the effect of the film is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle that disorients us so much in the beginning we begin to lose patience with seeing it through to completion. Stars George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, William Hurt, Mazhar Munir, Tim Blake Nelson, Amanda Peet and Christopher Plummer. 3.5 stars.
TRANSAMERICA (R) Felicity Huffman, who snagged a well-deserved Golden Globe for her performance here, is the main reason to see Transamerica, but the rest of the film isn't too shabby either. Huffman stars as a woman trapped in the body of a man, and whose long-awaited sex change surgery is put on hold when a troubled teenaged son (Kevin Zegers) appears out of the blue and demands rescuing. Father/mother and son pack up their belongings into a beat-up car and head for the coast, as Transamerica becomes an episodic and pleasantly eccentric road movie in which the characters eventually reveal themselves to each other. The film strains a bit to work out the correct balance of sweet and sour, and nothing in the movie even begins to measure up to Huffman's tour-de-force performance, but Transamerica is a trip well worth taking. Also stars Graham Greene and Fionnula Flanagan. 3.5 stars.