RECENT RELEASES
30 DAYS OF NIGHT (R) The premise is delicious — vampires descend on an isolated Alaskan community shrouded in bloodsucker-friendly, month-long darkness — but the suspense builds too quickly, and the all-important atmosphere of 30 Days of Night too often devolves into mayhem. Josh Hartnett and Melissa George are the disposable human leads, while the movie's real strength lies in its monsters: a nasty, thoroughly repulsive lot (no Anne Rice dandies need apply) led by Danny Huston, unexpectedly convincing as a vampiric overlord cleverly re-imagined as a lumbering, Eastern-Euro thug. The film pays homage to all the best horror tropes, but director David Slade can't quite seem to orchestrate his elements in a completely satisfying way, and the cumulative effect falls a little flat. There are individual scenes of ferocious terror as well as moments of pure poetry here, but the action moves in fits and starts, ending in a flurry of shotgun blasts and unbecoming action-hero catchphrases. Also stars Ben Foster and Mark Boone Junior. 3 stars
THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (R) A languorous art-western in the fabled mold of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Heaven's Gate and Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, Andrew Dominik's two-hour-and-40-minute The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. Some will see it as a pretentious slog, others as sheer poetry, but one thing's for sure: They don't make 'em like this anymore. The film presents Jesse James (Brad Pitt) as an early contender in the Cult of Personality — he and Mark Twain were the only Americans known in Europe in the late 19th century — and much is made here of the urge to bask in the outlaw's celebrity, of people wanting to hang around him, even to be him. Meandering back and forth through time, the movie lays out its elliptical story assisted by a melancholy, matter-of-fact voice-over that gives up its details as methodically as Robert Bresson making his case in The Trial of Joan of Arc. The movie throws out much of the James legend, meditating upon its anti-hero as he goes through wild mood swings, alternately depressed, buoyant and unhinged, and ultimately even takes on a weirdly Christ-like aspect, wondering which of his squabbling gang members is going to betray him. James' Judas turns out to be Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), a confused hanger-on whose obsession borders on the homoerotic and whose titular act of violence briefly makes him even more famous than the celebrity killer he kills. An appreciation of The Assassination of Jesse James hinges less on suspension of disbelief than on suspension of our reliance on snappy pace and linear plotting, but those who do give themselves over to the film's demanding poetry may find themselves well rewarded. Also stars Sam Shepard, Paul Schneider, Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Garret Dillahunt, Mary-Louise Parker and Michael Parks. 4.5 stars
BEE MOVIE (PG) Jerry Seinfeld returns from the stand-up comedy wilderness with this CGI-animated offering about a spunky little bee who wants more (as apparently do all animated creatures these days). The voice cast alone might be reason enough to investigate: Besides Seinfeld, Renee Zelwegger, Matthew Broderick and John Goodman, there's an eclectic ensemble including Rip Torn, Sting, Oprah Winfrey and Larry King. (Not Reviewed)
DAN IN REAL LIFE (PG-13) Steve Carell stars as single dad with a house full of girls and a serious crush on his brother's girlfriend (Juliette Binoche). Also stars Dane Cook, John Mahoney and Emily Blunt. (Not Reviewed)
THE DARJEELING LIMITED (R) Wes Anderson's new movie often seems closer to fever dream than real life, but it's cohesive in ways that the director's previous film, The Life Aquatic, wasn't. The color-coded confusion and calculated whimsy that got the better of Life Aquatic still occasionally creep in, but Darjeeling is a funnier and more focused trip, giving us three strangers on a train — semi-estranged brothers Francis (Owen Wilson), Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Peter (Adrien Brody) — reunited for what the eldest promises will be a "spiritual journey" across India. (It's a promise made so solemnly it's impossible to mistake for anything other than totally absurd, like most everything that transpires here.) The brothers indulge themselves in synchronized chain-smoking, keep themselves buzzed with potent Indian painkillers, squabble and engage in virtually nonstop non sequiturs and poker-faced kvetching. The squabbles occasionally mutate into physical brawls, pepper spray and poisonous snakes are produced, the snake gets loose on the titular train, and Schwartzman plays passive-aggressive sex games with a sad-eyed stewardess in the train's bathroom. Anderson applies meticulously measured rhythms to even the film's most screwbally impulses, occasionally punctuating them with dreamy, slo-mo passages, so that The Darjeeling Limited often feels like a Marx Brothers movie on Thorazine. Also stars Amara Karan, Waris Ahluwalia and Anjelica Huston. 3.5 stars
THE FINAL SEASON (PG) Fact meets feel-good schmaltz in Hollywood's latest sports drama, which is based the true story of the Norway Tigers. The setting is the small Midwestern town of Norway, Iowa, which takes great pride in its high-school baseball team and for good reason: The Tigers have won 19 state championships over 24 years of competing. Conflict arises when the school board threatens to disband Norway's high school as part of a statewide plan to merge small schools with larger ones. When the school's legendary head coach steps aside to take a job in the major leagues, the new, more inexperienced coach (played by Sean Astin) is faced with finding a way to make the team's final season count. While sports movie clichés abound, The Final Season has enough heart (and enough zippy one-liners) to overcome the weight of banality and rise above its shortcomings. Also stars Powers Boothe, Rachel Leigh Cook and Tom Arnold. 3 stars —Caitlin Kuleci
FRED CLAUS (PG) Vince Vaughan stars as the black sheep brother of none other than jolly old St. Nick himself (Paul Giamatti) in this kid-friendly comedy of sibling rivalry and holiday cheer. Also stars Miranda Richardson, Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins. (Not Reviewed)
GONE BABY GONE (R) Casey Affleck stars in brother Ben's surprisingly good directorial debut about something rotten in a working class Boston neighborhood where a little girl has gone missing. Gone Baby Gone is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote Clint Eastwood's Mystic River, and, frankly, Affleck outdoes Eastwood in his understanding of the author's Boston-based turf. Affleck goes for maximum authenticity, trolling through the city's seedier sides with a camera that discretely observes the nonglamorous flora and fauna, making good use of virtual unknowns in several key roles. The director occasionally even shows himself to be a touch over-enamored with his blue collar grotesques — it sometimes seems like every Beantown resident with a hair lip, goiter or obesity problem gets screen time here — but Gone Baby Gone still manages to be an effectively disquieting descent into a local underworld. Lehane's source material culminates in a series of dubious plot twists involving a conspiracy of least likely suspects, but Affleck wisely uses this as a springboard to get into something more interesting, albeit uncomfortable. Also stars Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, John Ashton, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan and Titus Welliver. 3.5 stars
INTO THE WILD (R) This is Sean Penn's meandering but strangely compelling take on the true story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), a child of privilege who burned his IDs, gave away his money and, reborn as Alexander Supertramp, hit the open road. Into the Wild unfolds on a certain level as a road movie, with Chris/Alex hooking up with fellow travelers as he makes his way across the country, but the film also offers frequent flashbacks providing a parallel story obsessing on the familial tensions supposedly being left behind. The flashback structure and ominous, anguished tone of the voice-overs leave little doubt that we're witnessing a tragedy, however, and the movie's pervasive fatalism provides a bottom note even to Into the Wild's brighter moments. To his credit, and despite a soundtrack studded with painfully sincere Eddie Vedder songs, Penn doesn't turn Alex into a hero — his quest ultimately seems as foolish as it is noble. The film is too long by at least a half hour, and its frequent attempts to provide Alex with metaphorical surrogate families are a bit transparent, but there's something important being communicated here about the beauty and folly of attempting a personal spiritual revolution, the closest corollary being Herzog's Grizzly Man. Also stars Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Brian Dierker, Kristen Stewart and Hal Holbrook. 3.5 stars
LIONS FOR LAMBS (PG-13) Relentlessly wordy and almost painfully static, Lions for Lambs is essentially a series of dialogues — or, more plainly put, a collection of scenes in which pairs of people sit in various rooms, talking. There are three loosely linked scenarios here, including an up-and-coming Republican Senator (Tom Cruise) being interviewed by a somewhat suspicious journalist (Meryl Streep); two American soldiers (Michael Pena and Derek Luke) stranded on a snowy mountaintop in Afghanistan; and a college professor (Robert Redford) trying to get a bright but terminally cynical student (Todd Hayes) to become engaged with the world. The segments ramble on and eventually intersect, characters get to periodically exclaim Oscar-ready lines like, "Rome is burning!" and the implication is that we — every last man, woman and child in the audience — are all to some extent fiddling while the professional dickheads in Washington thrive on our collective apathy. Ultimately, the movie says nothing more controversial than "Bush screwed up" and "Get involved" — two all-purpose slogans for any party in this election year — and even these innocuously noble assessments are funneled into something as safe as any politician's prepared statement, a lifeless My Dinner with Andre reduced to sound bites from the evening news. Also stars Todd Hayes, Peter Berg and Kevin Dunn. 2 stars
MARTIAN CHILD (PG) Lonely and quirky widower John Cusack adopts an even lonelier and quirkier child in this sappy time-waster about loving the alien inside us all. Cusak's new kid (Bobby Coleman) claims to be from Mars, and with his pasty skin and big bug-eyed sunglasses, he certainly looks the part — he's actually called a "mini-Warhol" at one point but is really a closer match to Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. The whole "Martian" thing is, of course, simply the script's exclamation point on the boy's outsider status, but nothing really happens here to convince us that the kid's half as troubled as he's supposed to be. The movie plods along as adult and child bond over Lucky Charms and baseball, with time out for a food fight or two and the death of a beloved family pet, set to Cat Stevens music. In the end, the kid actually does turn out to be from Mars, shape-shifts back into his original form of a 12-foot insect with venomous fangs and bites off Cusack's head. Just kidding. Also stars Amanda Peet, Joan Cusack, Oliver Platt, Richard Schiff and Sophie Okonedo. 2 stars
MY KID COULD PAINT THAT (PG-13) The film's ostensive subject is little Marla Olmstead, who became an overnight media sensation at age 4 (when her abstract paintings began selling for upwards of $20,000), and then was just as quickly discarded when a 60 Minutes piece suggested her art was either being coached or created by an overzealous parent. All of this media-intensive activity occurs as director Amir Bar-Lev's documentary is in the process of being shot, and Marla's mother and father begin looking at the film-in-progress as a way to vindicate their daughter and themselves. Unfortunately, the Olmsteads soon discover, to their considerable horror and embarrassment, that Bar-Lev has his own doubts about where the truth in this infinitely complicated story lies. My Kid Could Paint That becomes richer and more ambiguous as it unfolds, as the focus shifts from the Olmstead family to the troubled filmmaker himself and then to the mixed messages stirred up by professionals such as New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman. Almost inevitably, the movie raises many more questions that it's prepared to answer, but there's a perversely satisfying symmetry in that. We're ultimately encouraged to read between the film's lines in a way that invites comparisons to how meaning becomes attached to all nonfigurative art, whether it's by Jackson Pollack, a monkey or a 4-year-old girl. Stars Mark, Laura and Marla Olmstead, Elizabeth Cohen, Anthony Brunelli and Michael Kimmelman. 3.5 stars
P2 (R) Minimalist stalk-and-slash horror directed by first-timer Franck Khalfoun and produced by Alexandre Aja (Haute Tension and The Hills Have Eyes remake), that plays like a stripped-down, somewhat less compelling version of Aja's own work. Virtually the entire movie takes place in a deserted parking garage lorded over by a psychotic attendant who kidnaps a young businesswoman for a long and progressively deadly evening of cat and mouse. Wes Bentley (Ghost Rider) is a bit too bland as the heavy, and Angela Nichols isn't required to do much beyond communicating various degrees of hysteria as the victim, but the film still manages to generate a consistently creepy atmosphere, making good use of its claustrophobic setting through some imaginative camera placement and choreography. The final effect is a bit too much like a well-crafted made-for-TV movie but still worth a look, particularly for fans of the genre. Also stars Simon Reynolds. 3 stars
SAW IV (R) Yet another installment of the torture-porn franchise that just wouldn't die. Stars David Koechner, Carl Weathers, Brooke Nevin, Jackie Long and Matthew Lawrence. (Not Reviewed)
WE OWN THE NIGHT (R) Writer-director James Gray, who previously tracked the criminal element from an immigrant's point of view in Little Odessa and The Yards, is back on familiar turf with this male-dominated family saga of corrupt cops and Russian gangsters mixing it up in Brighton Beach. Gray reunites his stars from The Yards, Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, as brothers on opposite sides of the law. Also stars Eva Mendes and Robert Duvall. (Not Reviewed)
This article appears in Nov 14-20, 2007.