Completely outlandish, despite writer Alex Garland's (apologetic?) claim that it was a "'love letter' to psychologically minded science fiction". Unlike Garland's previous script for 28 Days Later, all of the procedural garbledegook comes out as raw exposition, its characters little more than thinly veiled archetypes unable to garner an iota of emotional pulse (except the dude that rests somewhere between human and God - he was just fucking silly). That said, Boyle's film is visually superior to nearly all of the recent and not so recent (read: 90s) Martyrs-in-Space-Save-Earth-at-Zero-Hour films. Seeing sunlight as a universally healing glow that's both the object of the calamity and the most beautiful thing anyone on the ship can possibly imagine, Danny Boyle creates a larger-than-life world that feels less overtly digitized, more aligned with expanding the grasp of the medium on a palatable level by hiding the computer-age tinkering in some sort of middleground between imagination and well placed shadows. There's a thud early enough in the film - I think its the first sequence where dialogue is spoken, in point of fact - which, on the same apologetic tip mentioned earlier in the notice, makes it distinctly possible to enjoy the film as a piece of visual art, almost in the same way Johnnie To's Exiled makes its narrative completely disposable. That's not quite the case here, but the concept is similar.

Stumbling into real life drama that's only interesting because its characters are larger-than-life nerds, here be the same sort of colloquial heroes championed in films like Hell House and Hands on a Hardbody. Ostensibly, the rivalry betwixt Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell takes the center ring, but film attempts to encircle this strange clash over the highest Donkey Kong score on record with a broader vision (that doesn't fare as well) about being a so-called "winner". Where both Wiebe and Mitchell have achieved success by any nerd definition - the former a science teacher with a fine family and the latter, owner of a hot sauce empire (including a restaurant) and married to a woman with gigantic breasts - neither can let themselves rest in an areena populated by grown men obsessed with classic arcade games. The film never mocks or jabs these characters, smartly - and without snickering - letting them speak their own language and unsheath their own motives. (And, to be fair, its always entertaining to watch a jerk and Billy Mitchell is quite the asshole.)

An superheated pageant that looks immensely overpolished, overthought and sounds far too spec-script. Most offensive, however, is the way it manages to reduce premier thespians like Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen and Geoffrey Rush to whispers of their former selves. Historical epics - particularly one as unceremoniously profiicient as Elizabeth - don't seem like the best place to attempt character continuation and duplication of financial success (without being totally off-the-wall a la Ocean's Twelve, I mean). I long for installment the third, thereby flushing this out of Kapur's system for keeps.

Atonement's uber-depressing cascade of devastation is rendered somewhere between sweeping and intimate, subverting each with a casualness that seems almost cruel.  But for all its darkness and grandeur, Robbie and Celia seem bottled up in a predetermined opera of fatalism (albeit one that I was thoroughly wrapped up in.) The narrative is immediately collapsible, which makes it tough to fault its transparency; It's more entertaining than it has any right to be.

[ Briony's tender scene with a dying soldier carefully cements her as someone to whom truth is an innate commodity in real life and she dangles on the hook in a permanent state of guilt, even weeping as an old woman. Her rendering, finally, of the title action subverts this, but gives her such a terrific dimension: While everyone else has to live with their reality, she can molest it, fictionalizing - but confessing so - and both pulling one over on her audience and achieving catharsis. She seems so despicable and then so pitiable but, finally, she turns out to be too self-serving to pity. As played by three generations of actresses (Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave - all amazing), she's the main character in a story that finds her removed from the key events almost entirely (as a witness, as a submissive nurse and, finally, as a writer). The film also indulges in and breaks free from its Merchant Ivory spectrum: Subject matter and faux-Richard Robbins score weigh in against a director who fancies moving the camera a bit more and trotting out digital touch-up here and there. We coast through the near-audacious luxury of the homestead with its surrounding natural elements, an otherworldly tracking shot through the beach on Dunkirk and all the requisite drawing rooms, fountains, churches and graveyards. But for all its darkness and grandeur, Robbie and Celia seem bottled up in a predetermined opera of fatalism (albeit one that I was thoroughly wrapped up in.) The narrative is immediately collapsible, which makes it tough to fault its transparency: Its out - as a tale retold - is at once a cop-out and the point. Significantly better than expected, but Wright & Co. should have adapted McEwan's "Amsterdam", a far better tale.]

It pains me to point out a genuinely bad tonal mismatch in a film by Noah Baumbach, but Margot at the Wedding mixes the dark tones of transcending childhood abuse and muted 70s talk-a-thons (particularly those of Rohmer) into a perpetual rehash of The Squid and the Whale's overtly-mature-teenager-worshipping-the-writer-parent verve. The whole thing is more of a curiousity - minor Baumbach for sure - with everyone in tight-knit, improvisational mode, giving it a lived-in resolve that - while remarkable - still adds up to a central character who really isn't nearly as interesting as a way-backseat neighborly feud between said central character's sister/fiance and a family who guts pigs in their spare time. I love its almost creepy shell: All dark, natural light with a note of grainy bluetone that looks, firmly, like film. Baumbach's ear for dialogue continues to be his genius; He can be the funniest writer in the business when he wants to be. Jack Black's casting is, I think, meant to be funny.

The title alone bleeds apathy (an American gangster film? Really? What more can be said?) and the film follows suit, for the most part. Marginally telling is the sense that acting bravura not only consistently trumps anything approaching "substance", but that its essentially the only anomalous show in town. Details of interest are few and far between, accentuated by how insanely broad the film feels, never indulging procedural humdrum, which is where filmmaking tends to distract us from perpetual cinematic déjà vu. This said, Crowe is in dumpy Wigand mode, all potent honesty in the face of logic, carrying his physical bulk with less grace, as if to embrace imperfection, a trait that manifests itself in his thankless, pointless career chasing drug dealers. Easily the least interesting of the dovetailing plotlines, we watch through a haze of yawn as the fuzz breaks open a drug runner and then corruption on the force with an indifference that plays is TV at best, rote at worst. Washington, on the other hand, casts as steely spell, tapping the complete reversal of any villian he's ever portrayed; Never has he exuded confidence with such quiet, with such calm and with such genuinely agreeable fervor. He has flip-out moments, but none recall Alonso, and none match the terrifying tranquility of the close-range murder of a rival on a busy street. It's a scene that calls out to you from the annals of the genre and reverses your expectations breathlessly and shockingly. It might be the one moment in the film where Ridley Scott is less preoccupied with The Art Direction of the 70s or ensuring the film's Prestige feel, and is, instead, genuinely focused on the darkness of the world around. Like nearly half a dozen films in the Denzel Washington canon, American Gangster is forgettably unnecessary save for his turn.

Dialogue is pretty much king here, and I can't figure out whether its merely cynicism knocked up to fetish levels or an artistic rendering of the sound of empty youth (a la The Doom Generation). Whatever the case, it sounds wonderful. Ellen Page defends her fear with a mask of unwavering cleverness and the actress is more than fit, Hard Candy and its operatics be damned. Batemen's character - with his unending vigil to a dead career in the rock star arts - feels immensely relatable, but I must confess that it's Michael Cera's sensitive and tender baby daddy that truly clicked into me: It's no small feat to inspire fond recall of easily the worst and most difficult portion of my own life. Smart plan on this one, too, Reitman: Let someone else write it.

Completely and utterly tailored for Tim Burton from start to finish, but without the hollowness of the equally Burton-suited Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; Everything about it feels unrelenting, as if anything could happen - the single quality lacking in Burton's woork since at least the 90s. Depp and Co. sing at least on-key, but their voices are never more than adequate, which doesn't irk me too terribly much.

Immensely entertaining in a 90s-throwback-sorta wise; For my money, the grand tasteless experiment of matching step and tone of The American President to outline our covert war in Afghanistan in the late 80s is really pretty much the point - and I was taken with it (dig every scene in Afghanistan and just how ignoble and cartoonishly American-perspective driven it is). Nichols suckles at the teet of Sorkin's charming vernacular with a more mature, but less winning sparkle than Rob Reiner (believe it or not, this film can't seem to make a succinct case for Wilson's Mr. Smith heroics without first considering the blowback, always nodding to how far removed we are as an audience in 2007). It has the makings of a great hybrid but, in the end, seems far too content flushing it all down the sewer with prestige and sincerity. It'll play great in hyper-loop on cable a shockingly few number of months from now.

Its effective reach - to divide an audience over a significant, damned-if-you-do-and-if-you-don't moral standing - is matched only by its supreme outlandishness, made surprisingly palatable by Affleck the younger, who renders the very mechanics of struggle within archetypal detective characters who are idealistically pure (and whose seemingly selfish motives have all been red herrings). It stages this in a deeply lived-in urban landscape: A not quite poor, but definitely desperate working class Boston. Amy Ryan is terrific; Declaring, at one point to feel "like 9/11", her thundering indifference - coupled with "a lot of coke" - become a festoon of devastation when the camera pans back to reveal the shattering weight of trusting the system. Depth be damned, though, Gone Baby Gone is immensely watchable, particularly in its crackerjack pulp novel vim (a vim the far too polished and pious Mystic River seemed to avoid like the plague for some reason). And we owe it all to one Ben Affleck - - whoever the fuck he is.

Brody's backstory is tiresome from the word go, as is his disposition, which wouldn't be such a blow if Owen Wilson weren't so tedious to watch. This is a high grade to give for a film where Wes Anderson becomes a parody of himself and Owen Wilson feels genuinely annoying to me. Hotel Chevalier and its roots (namely, every scene with Jason Schwartzman, when he is not with his brothers) coupled with the tight (but not reductive) look of the film keeps the promise of greatness possible, even though a good peg of the running time feels like a more literal version of The Fathers theme that's been remarkably constant and substantantial in his other, better films. Only without the father. Imagine if The Royal Tenenbaums had simply been a comedy about the tension between Chas, Margot and Richie: It would likely have been pure commonplace at best, shrill at a more likely worst. I very much expected to find the relationships between these three brothers relatable to my own sibling scenario. I was hard pressed.

Rousing and spartan take, but the story itself is still the real prize. The motion capture is slightly more advanced here than The Polar Express, but retains the same inherant dichotomy: If this process is being used to economize on prevalent, sky's-the-limit special effects pictures, awkward human faces are the price. Beowulf is the most successful of the three I've seen (Final Fantasy rounding it out), as it playfully alters everyone into either unrecognizable - but plausible - faces (e.g., Robin Wright-Penn) or beard and weight embellishments (The Blokes: Winstone, Hopkins, Malkovich and Gleeson). That it leans so heavily on Angelina Jolie's digi-rotoscoped breasts - a strangely hypnotic fascination the film has for some reason - guarantees that whether it be chucked in the fantasy nerd bucket or the intellectual scholar bucket, Zemeckis' film will likely not be earmarked for High School English Class consumption.

Completely interesting and noble study of atypically complex, really stunning characters with a completely baffling/laughably tacked-on thematic parallel to the story of David and Goliath it seems content to lug around, I'm afraid. It also seems to have an interesting - or at least uncommon - political standpoiint (showing the direct damage The Iraq War does on people on the homefront), but ends the film in rather treacly territory (involving a flag, I must warn).  Cliches rack its case-cracking antics, but the film is completely and utterly engrossing. I'll settle for a schizophrenic, contradictory, can't-get-out-of-his-own-way Paul Haggis over the Paul Haggis that made Crash any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Suggesting itself into a chinese box of sorts, My Kid Could Paint That at first seems enraptured by the story of Marla, a 4 year old Binghamton girl who has a brief, but profitable flare-up of success as an outsider artist. As the story could easily be encapsulated in a brief news segment, Bar-Lev winds up examining whether people feel conned by modern art, itself entirely subjective and, often, suspiciously simplistic. Then it looks at the media that turns on its subject, the film argues, in order to make the story more interesting for the documentarian, who then begins to question whether he himself believes the 4 year old is the only one making this art - a move, he ponders, that might also be concocted to further spice up the story. The reflexive nature of the piece unfolds with interest, but it doesn't hurt that Marla's paintings are awesome to look at and that she and her brother seem completely unaware of the situations swirling around them. The whole thing seems to court its larger subject - namely, the horrible Catch-22 of fame - with clarity and fearlessness.

There are moments of greatness, certainly his dogma appeals to me greatly, but I doubt the interiors of the book made it onto the screen intact - despite Penn's attempts with narration, time-jumping and screen titles. The great question I found myself discussing with friends was of whether his parents deserved to be shunned, which must have seemed more relevant than anything to do with the main character. (By the way: I say they deserved it, damn the consequences.) Unfortunately, though, Hirsh's quest - while it may or may not have happened that way - seems as rounded as any road movie, making the requisite mother-figure stop along the way (and, surprise, she lost a son! what a fucking coincidence!), the obligatory - or, you could say, tacked the fuck on - romantic interlude and, finally, Hal Holbrook - in a sequence seemingly justified by its Oscar nomination, but which unspools in as rote and as predictably grasshopper as you could possibly imagine. The best scenes find Hirsch alone in the wilderness (per the title); These are wisely interspersed throughout instead of relegated to the last bit of the film. Penn's films have yet to blow me away. Tossing Eddie Vedder's voice in didn't help, either.

The first hour has history lesson tendencies, but the animation so fluidly communicates the arc, so beautifully and comfortably renders the experiental aspects of such, that the film becomes entertaining as both an episodic tinkering of a graphic novel and a straight line narrative that mutes many of its coming-of-age cliches. After that, it loses steam, finding itself with little story left to tell but the ever-safe, ever-present embrace of a meandering personal responsibility following the rejection of both the fruits of freedom and the restrictions of oppression. Its best moments reminded me a bit of My Neighbors the Yamadas, its worst bits of every Long Journey From Third World Bleakness import ever made.

A mess, to be sure; The wife was explaining all the big losses it took in terms of content, most of them rendering what was onscreen scant and far less effective. It's entertaining, though, and still quite exciting to see all of these reputable British thespians lending their craft to something this inane, and watching its fantasy bubble float along without so much as a speck of substance. Oldman's death is among the most awful experiences of the series thusfar.

Dull, more than anything; Tang Wei is fine and Tony Leung is a fine hardass, but their communicatory sex - its uniquely titillating nature notwithstanding - has little or nothing to do with little or nothing. Her theater cronies are in full-on melodrama mode from the word go and their antics become sillier and sillier (oh, and they're supposed to be her backup in the "resistance"). The film is unfocused - or rather, it's focused on too much that's not all that interesting. Or, rather, should be more interesting, given that its about a spy operation during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.

Flirts with something classical - the worship of 80s urban warfare between cops and crooks as seen in the cinema - but comes up with something as heavy-handed and needlessly peppered with histrionics as Gray's own The Yards. Its also the first Major Motion Picture I've seen where mumbling seems encouraged (unintelligible dialogue apparently a stamp of realism). Phoenix channels Henry Hill, with Wahlberg doing what he does most (getting pissed off and making that intense face - repeatedly). The rest of the scenery is left to be chewed by immense plot convenience and isolated, evocative set pieces ("Ambush in the Rain", I'm looking in your direction). As Matt once said, "The poster is so cool. Way better than the film."

As a tale of an already faith-challenged man tested by the most enormous of leaps - he is paralyzed with only his left eye to communicate - Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is admirably proficient, but seems to while in a place where experential POV works gangbusters, a voice over track illuminates us and a third person reverb of perspective serves, unfortunately, to confuse us. You'll be jarred almost to annoyance the first time Schnabel cuts from inside the locked-in Bauby to a profile shot of our hero's face. Its as if this approach - the stand-back approach - is the last strand of anticlimatic convention premeditated by Harwood's script (which is otherwise hijacked by a wonderfully free-flowing cinema, itself essentially a sea of prose reflected in a tiny orb). Kaminski's photography is superb, but the whole thing plays like a great big stream of consciousness art film reduced, occasionally, to a hospital doc you'd probably not return to when it went to commercial. It has worked on me, though, in my memory.

Gracefully absurd, light, overflowing with puns and rarely - although fatally - sweet. Seinfeld's distinctive fights-fair jokeweaving makes some of it seem almost overwhelming, stuffed with background sight gags that serve as scraps left on the night table and misinterpreted the next morning. The awkward bee-Zelwegger tryst gives way to the film's almost head-shakingly befuddlin' centerpiece wherein a bee sues honey corporations in an actual courtroom with actual lawyers. Its not a satisfying film, really; It ends suspiciously trite, as most commonplace animated films tend to. To some degree, though, that it delivers at all on what it promises - namely, Seinfeld and lots of him - is something of a miracle.

A lighter, equally stunning Songs From the Second Floor, You the Living seems less bent on the substance of life's absurdity than on the whimsy - a tactic that never falls flat, serving both the brilliant, continuous flow of the mise-en-scene and the characters, each more full of bittersweet humanity than the last.

Thin on the poetic art of scene movement, The Golden Compass glides along on the coattails of its exposition-heavy dialogues; It's as if the CliffsNotes of the novel are being acted out by a series of ever-disconnected readers posing as quote-unquote characters. While its digital world is, at times, pretty dazzling, it seems to shrink just about everything and everyone down to the same broad size as the Lord of the Rings films, the Harry Potter films and, especially, the Narnia film(s) (we'll assume Prince Caspian mirrors TL,TW and TW's "Holy Digi!"-brand antics). And while, at heart, it has just as many insanely lazy moments as those films, it comes off more like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (or even one of the recent Star Wars films). I think the bottom line is preference. The current generation - those a bit younger than myself, but certtainly old enough to have an opinion - probably doesn't prefer the creative solutions to artistic problems exercised in the 70s, 80s and early 90s with sets, matte paintings and rubber creatures of both the animatronic and puppeteered kind. That said, Nicole Kidman's religious vamp, seemingly yawning this off as a preamble to a future installment's foregone transformation, all but derails any gravity the film had bubbled up in its first act. It passes by harmlessly and I barely notice as I begin to forget details.

It eventually becomes pretty silly (that risk with the dog, the absurd nature of his suicide bout, that crap at the end - you now what I mean), but its procedural vision of an isolated lifestyle thrilled me to no end. Will Smith's daily solo grind plays like Cast Away set in the urban playground of New York City. Even when the diseased are revealed, the film still remains marginally disarming. (I have romantic love for the cut just before two helicopters collide.)

Such a shadow cast by 24 Hour Party People, a film that pays homage to Joy Division (and its kin) with so much less dully matter-of-fact bio notes, each one diminishing the mystery and wonder of Ian Curtis more than the last with its homogenized movie-ness. Corbijn frames the time with such a beautifully-trained eye - Control is stunning to look at, it really is - we can't help but feel like this is a film that could only exist in a vacuum. Its little better than Wonderland is to Boogie Nights. The music is still dead-on, and there's nothing generally wrong with it (it opens stronger than it finishes, mostly because it takes place in a span of time we're not already bombarded with); Part of the film's staleness lies in the fact that it caters to such a specific demographic, that its almost certainly being viewed by someone already familiar with the story its telling. Adapting Curtis' wife's book will certainly make for intimacy, but there's still a bitter poison in it; Corbijn seems uninterested in perspective, leaving Deb's voice largely intact. Its another film that makes me feel like, as a fanboy, I'm supposed to love it unconditionally.