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Edge of Darkness is actually better than its lame title would suggest.

It's yet another vigilante film, this time focusing on Boston detective Thomas Craven (Mel Gibson), who has a still, mournful quality—and this is before his only daughter (Bojana Novakovic) is gunned down in front of him.

At first, Craven and the rest of the Boston PD, think he was the intended target, but as Craven investigates his daughter's murder, he finds himself neck-deep in a tangly conspiracy...
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At the very least, I expected to cry. I mean, a movie based on a true story about a father struggling to get a drug on the market to save his two dying children? Two hankies, minimum.

But Extraordinary Measures, while certainly well-intentioned, is so ill-conceived, it doesn't even work on the most basic of levels. It's a tear jerker that is incapable of jerking tears.

One of the film's central problems is that it can't quite decide what to be: A treacly melodrama about the effects of catastrophic illness on a family or a behind-the-scenes look at the world of drug trials and pharmaceutical companies. That second premise would actually be kind of interesting, in the hands of a talented director of procedurals like Steven Soderbergh or Michael Clayton's Tony Gilroy. But Scottish director Tom Vaughan is clearly out of his league...
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Heaven is hard. No, I'm not making a religious point about the difficulty of living a life worthy of a heavenly ascent. I'll leave that to the theologians. I'm talking about the depiction of heaven in film. Some have gone with a simple clouds-and-halos approach. Others, like the misbegotten What Dreams May Come, have gone for a vast technicolor dreamscape. Either way, it's a risk. And maybe that's why so many people said that The Lovely Bones was unfilmable.

Alice Sebold's novel is narrated from above by 14-year-old Susie Salmon (played in the film by Saoirse Ronan), who matter-of-factly tells us the story of her own murder and its effect on her family, especially her father, who obsessively pursues the killer.

Director Peter Jackson captures the wistful quality of the novel-the innocence of early '70s (a time before "milk carton photos and public service announcements"); the heady rush of first love (Susie is besotted by the poetry-spouting new boy in school); the happy clutter of a well-adjusted family—and it makes the intrusion of death and perversity all the more jarring...
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Okay kids, ready to take the Leap Year quiz? Let's see if you, too, could have written the script for this painfully predictable romantic comedy.

1. Amy Adams plays our heroine Anna. She's . . .

a. A control freak and closet romantic who has lost sight of the important things in life.

b. A real estate stager by day and dominatrix by night.

c. Secretly a man.

2. Adam Scott plays her boyfriend Jeremy. He's. . .

a. A self-absorbed surgeon without a romantic bone in his body.

b. A surgeon by day, ninja assasin by night.

c. Secretly a woman.

3. When Jeremy goes to Ireland...
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The idea of the glum Michael Cera—once described as a teen Bob Newhart—being in any way suave or swashbuckling is a fairly ripe source of comedy. Youth in Revolt takes that idea and runs with it. And just before the concept overstays its welcome, the film ends.

Cera plays Nick Twisp, basically the same character he always plays—a sensitive, miserable, too-smart-for-his-own-good nice boy pining away for a girl...
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I am totally loving Robert Downey Jr. v.2.0.

Downey Jr. has always been an extravagantly talented actor—but he was undisciplined, partly due to his well-documented personal problems and partly due to the fact that he was, well, young. But this seasoned Downey Jr. is in full command of his gifts—and what's more, he's sexier than ever. (Did I just write that out loud?). Casting Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes? Yes, please!

So for its brilliant casting alone, I have to praise Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, even if I agree with those who feel that Ritchie strayed way too far from Arthur Conan Doyle's vision of the character (a Holmes who's kicking butt and taking names? gimme a break.) But the script—doctored by no less than five writers—at least gives Downey Jr. a chance to shine...
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Come Comic-Con time next year, you're likely to see a group of teenagers coated in sparkly blue paint, with big ears, yellow eyes, and platform shoes, speaking in the indigenous tongue of the Na'vi, hanging in front of the Convention Center.

And that's just what director James Cameron had in mind.

With Avatar, he's created an alternate universe for sci-fi types to geek out over—and he's sweated over every detail. The film, presented in eye-popping 3D, is, quite simply, a spectacle—it transports you to another world, with its own unique foliage (shimmering dandelions and Parthenon-sized trees) and animals (feathered rhinoceros; pterodactyl-style birds; wolf-like dogs with exposed skeletal structure). And he's created the aforementioned Na'vi—giant, strangely beautiful creatures, mostly peaceful, with their own elaborate language (Klingon anyone?) and customs.

Ah, if only Cameron had put as much effort into the dialogue as he did the planet Pandora. But then again, that's not really his thing, now is it?

Avatar focuses on a young Marine, Jake Sully (dreamboat-y Sam Worthington), who's been injured in combat and is paralyzed from the waist down. He's recruited to be part of a secret military project that travels to Pandora to mine its precious natural resources. But because humans can't breath on Pandora—and because the Na'vi don't take too kindly to strangers—the military are forced to create Avatars—living, breathing Na'vi simulations, controlled remotely by the minds of their human counterparts...
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Are you ready to see Robert De Niro in full-on old man sad sack mode, a la Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt? No? Consider yourself warned.

In the overly schematic Everybody's Fine, the Raging Bull himself plays lonely widower Frank Goode, who, after his adult children blow him off for the holidays, decides to bring Mohammed to the mountains. One by one, he makes surprise visits to his kids—inquiring about their happiness, expressing concern for their well-being, but discovering that not all is as it seems...
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The great Irish director Jim Sheridan makes some of the most emotionally articulate films I've ever seen. I cried my way through most of My Left Foot and In America, and now I've done the same during his latest, Brothers. The film, a faithful remake of Danish director Susanne Bier's  Brodre, tells the story of two brothers, one good and one bad—that is, if you believe family lore.

Sam (Toby Maguire) is a decorated Marine and former high school quarterback married to Grace (Natalie Portman), his childhood sweetheart. They have two young daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare). Sam is just getting ready for another tour of duty in Afghanistan when his kid brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) gets released from jail. (The crime is never specified, but it appears to have been some sort of burglary.) The boys' alcoholic father Hank (Sam Shepherd), a Vietnam vet, thinks Tommy can do no right and Sam can do no wrong—and he never hesitates to say so. Inevitably, Tommy lives up to his family's low opinion of him.

When Sam's plane is shot down in Afghanistan, he is presumed dead. We know, in fact, that he's been taken prisoner by the Taliban.

Back at home, Grace and the two girls are hit the hardest and Tommy starts hanging around the house, helping with chores, eventually turning into a kind of surrogate father and husband...
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New Moon really is like porn for tweens. It has two dreamy boys—one athletic and smiley; the other brooding and poetic—both deeply, madly, eternally in love with the same girl. It features lots of moony stares and desperate embraces—and the fact that the athletic boy is a werewolf and the brooding guy is a vampire only adds to the total emo-ness of it all.

But I have to give the filmmakers credit. Much like Twilight before it, New Moon is respectfully pandering, if such a thing is possible...
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I experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance when they showed the real Michael Oher at the end of The Blind Side.

No, not because the young actor Quinton Aaron doesn't look much like the Ravens rookie offensive tackle—although he doesn't. But because the real Michael Oher walked with his head up—he had an athlete's gait, a quiet confidence. He wasn't the halting, shoe-gazing, nearly mute man-child depicted in the film.

No wonder it's rumored that Oher is not a fan of the film...
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2012 is like a 1970s disaster film on steroids. Instead of a towering inferno or a sinking cruiseliner, we have the whole planet Earth getting destroyed. Because that, ladies and gentleman, is how Roland Emmerich rolls.

2012 is a lot like Emmerich’s other apocalyptically-inclined gems—Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow—except the special effects are better and the film may even be more treacly...
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Robert Zemeckis’ 3-D animated Disney's A Christmas Carol is clearly a labor of love and, like so many labors of love, it feels slightly ill-advised.
Yes, the motion-capture animation is gorgeous—saturated, detailed, almost hyper real. But Zemeckis seems strangely intent on showing us just how real it can be...
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When I saw the trailer for The Men Who Stare at Goats, I got pretty excited. A military satire based on a true(ish) story about a secret branch of the army that tried to develop human super powers, staring Jeff Bridges as its baked commander and George Clooney as a wild-eyed true believer? Count me in.

But here’s the problem: The trailer is better than the film. The trailer lays out the storyline and shows some of the film’s best jokes—men trying to rush through walls and drive while blindfolded; George Clooney giving a death stare to a goat; Kevin Spacey expressing his regrets about a couple’s divorce at their wedding—but the movie itself is glib and unfocused. Sad to say, it works better edited down to four minutes...
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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Precious is that it isn't the most depressing film of the year.

It tells the story of 16-year-old Clareece "Precious" Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), who lives with her defiantly unemployed mother Mary (Mo'Nique) in a Harlem apartment...
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After seeing Amelia, you can only assume one of two things: That Amelia Earhart herself was an insipid, uninspiring woman or that filmmaker Mira Nair just blew it.

I think we can all draw the same conclusion.

How did this film go so far afoul? You have a talented director (I loved Nair’s The Namesake), a perfectly cast Hilary Swank as Earhart, and the kind of subject matter that seems destined to land on critic’s Top 10 lists.

But Nair made the classic mistake. She was so concerned with mimesis—yes, Swank looks like Earhart, the aviator-chic clothing is spiffy, and the planes look sufficiently rickety—that she didn’t bother with that she didn’t bother with story. You can’t just present us with the details of Earhart’s life. You have to show us what drove her, what gave her lift off...
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It just makes sense that Spike Jonze, whose imagination is seemingly limitless and who always manages to bring a sense of off-kilter joy to his films, would be the perfect director to adapt Maurice Sendak’s beloved children's book, Where the Wild Things Are.

In the opening scenes, we meet Max (iconically adorable Max Records), a little boy who wears a wolf suit and runs around his house like a “wild thing.” In Sendak’s book, it’s not completely clear why Max is being naughty—he’s just being a kid—but in this film's bold reimagining, Max’s father has died, his older sister ignores him, and his stressed-out mother (Catherine Keener) has started dating a new guy (Mark Ruffalo). Max has all these feelings—anger, loneliness, uncertainty—and, of course, the boundless physical energy of an 8-year-old...
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The trials of Job in 1950s Midwestern Jewish suburbia. That might be the best way to describe the dark comedy A Serious Man, which many are saying is the Coen brothers most personal film to date.

What, then, to make of the film’s protagonist, Larry Gopnik, played by New York theater vet Michael Stuhlbarg, and clearly a stand-in for Joel and Ethan’s dad? Yes, Larry is a decent man—his quest to be a serious one is open to debate. But he’s also a total doormat...
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After the brilliant Shaun of the Dead (and the decidedly less than brilliant Zombie Strippers!, among others), I figured the zombie spoof genre had played itself out.

Zombieland proved me wrong. The genius of the film is that it’s more buddy flick than horror spoof. And director Ruben Fleischer keeps things fresh with a freewheeling, anything-goes narrative (out of nowhere, for example, he will cut to the “Zombie Kill of the Week”) and a blissfully short attention span (the film clocks in at a perfect 82 minutes). It’s also funny. As hell.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Columbus, one of the few survivors of an epidemic virus that turned most people into flesh-eating zombies...
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Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying is sneakily subversive. It starts out as a very clever science fiction comedy: We’re in an alternate universe where lying doesn’t exist. As such, there is no fiction, and total truth in advertising.

“A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People,” reads the sign on the entranceway to an old age home.

“When There’s No Coke,” reads a billboard for Pepsi. (Heh.)

People, too, feel compelled to blurt out the truth: “I’m embarrassed to work  here,” says a waiter as he approaches a table where our hero Mark (Gervais) is on a date with beautiful Anna (Jennifer Garner.) “I’m out of your league,” she tells mark matter-of-factly.

When Mark gets fired from his job as a “screenwriter” (films are essentially historical readings) he finds himself in danger of being evicted. He goes to the bank to withdraw his final $300 and, in an epiphany, discovers that he can lie about the amount he has in his account. (He’s a nice guy. He says he has $800.) He has, as the title says, invented the lie.

Now he’s the most powerful person in the world...
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I think we can all agree that Drew Barrymore is one of the most lovable human beings on the planet. Not only is she totally BFF-approved, but she’s overcome a well-documented childhood-from-hell to become a major Hollywood player, both as actress and producer—all without losing her giddy flower girl charm.

I think the thing I like most about Whip It, Barrymore’s directorial debut, is that it manages to capture so much of Drew herself. It’s spunky, it’s spirited, it has an undeniable indie cool—and it cheerfully celebrates female sisterhood and girl power.

Ellen Page—wisely choosing her first starring vehicle since her breakout role in Juno—plays Bliss Cavendar, a misfit from the small town of Bodeen, TX, who longs to escape the world of barbecue, beauty queens, and football. When she goes on a shopping trip to Austin with her hovering mom (Marcia Gay Harden), she sees a couple of loud, fierce, and sexy girls on roller skates—they’re roller derby players. These girls are not demure like her mother’s beloved pageant queens—they are defiantly badly behaved. Bliss is mesmerized...
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I had something of a revelation about Michael Moore during  his latest, Capitalism: A Love Story: The man just can’t help himself.

Many of us watch Moore’s films and think: If only he’d be a little more temperate, if only he would lay it on a little less thick, if only he could avoid the easy mark or the knee-jerk sentimentality—then he could successfully deflect all of his critics.

But then, I realized, Moore wouldn’t be Moore. His mournful over-identification with the plight of the working man—and his sense of himself as their champion—isn’t manufactured or cynical in any way. It is who he is. It makes him great. It also, let’s face it, makes him a bit of a pain in the neck.

So it is with Capitalism: A Love Story, which is not Moore’s best work (I’d vote for Bowling for Columbine), but carries his usual sense of impeccable timing: America is just about as fed up with capitalism as he is...
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Matt Damon, sporting 30 extra pounds and an unflattering toupee and mustache, gives a bravura performance as Mark Whitacre, company man turned FBI snitch in Steve Soderbergh’s darkly comedic take on corporate crime, The Informant!

Whitacre, a real life corporate whistle blower, is a character like no other. His mind easily wanders (often at inopportune times) to banal trivialities—say, the time-saving benefits of flossing while taking a shower, the pronunciation of the word Porsche, or the failures of the metric system—but he thinks they’re deep thoughts. He has a fixation on Tom Cruise in The Firm and sees himself as a hero in his own thrilling high-stakes drama...
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Screenwriter Diablo Cody both amused us and annoyed us with her hipster teen speak in Juno. But I loved that film for its surprising tenderness. After all, woman cannot live on snark alone.

For her second film, Jennifer’s Body, Cody dials down the contrived puns (a good thing) but also seems to have lost her emotional way. Where Juno subverted our expectations at every turn—our too-cool indie hero was actually pretty square—Jennifer’s Body, which tells the story of a mean girl (Megan Fox) who becomes possessed by a demon, goes exactly where you would expect...
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To say that Love Happens should’ve gone straight to video is an insult to films that have gone straight to video. The story of Burke Ryan (Aaron Eckhart, dishy but dull), a self-help guru who can’t seem to help himself, is so tone deaf, so muddled, so poorly put together, I can only assume that the parts of the movie that made sense were left on the cutting room floor...
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In a way, I wish 9 was more weird. On first blush, Shane Acker’s animated film is quite unusual—a post-apocalyptic universe where rag dolls imbued with souls fight man-made machines run amok. But once you get past the whole “whoah, our heroes are rag dolls” thing, it’s pretty conventional stuff. Sometimes it reminded me of Wall-E (a good thing, I suppose) and sometimes it reminded me of Transformers (very definitely a bad thing) and sometimes it reminded me of Coraline, which also featured a creepy doll universe and was also (not coincidentally) executive produced by Tim Burton.

The post-apocalyptic world, for example, while beautifully animated, resembles pretty much every other post-apocalyptic world I’ve seen in films—blown out windows, dusty streets, eerily abandoned monuments...
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Have you ever met one of those guys with loads of potential, but he just kind of fritters it away because maybe he’s too lazy, too bored, or possibly too stoned to get motivated? Extract is the movie equivalent of that guy.

We know that writer/director Mike Judge is a funny man. Office Space is justifiably a cult hit and I happen to think that Beavis and Butthead was a major work of cultural satire (no. . .really).

Extract is actually funny in fits and starts. But I kept staring at the screen thinking, “This is the best Mike Judge can do? This is the film he got excited about?” (It’s particularly frustrating considering the fact that Judge has now made a grand total of 3 movies in the past decade...)
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It takes a lot of chutzpah to do a film about the most famous concert ever and have the action go near Woodstock, along the outskirts of Woodstock, behind the scenes at Woodstock, but never show us the concert itself. It could lead to a vague sense that there’s a better movie to be seen, off screen.

And to a certain extent, I admire Ang Lee for doing it (I'm actually a huge Lee fan and even liked his much-maligned Lust, Caution). After all, the Woodstock story has been told many times before. However, the story of the small innkeepers in the Catskills who unwittingly become the host to half a million hippie guests? Now that story has not been told...
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In The September Issue, RJ Cutler’s highly entertaining documentary about the making of the famed September issue of Vogue, editor Anna Wintour proves herself to be surprisingly delightful, charming, winsome. . . Oh, who am I trying to kid? She’s an ice queen.

Indeed, the most fascinating thing about Anna Wintour is this: She’s not fascinating at all. When Meryl Streep played a thinly veiled version of her in The Devil Wears Prada, she depicted her as regal, haughty, the kind of woman who could crush you with a snide comment or withering stare. But the real Anna Wintour is mousy, somewhat bloodless, even meek at times—she’s like Andy Warhol without the wide-eyed innocence that gave him his charm.

And yet, as the film makes quite clear, she is the most influential woman in fashion...
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Inglourious Basterds (more about the misspelling later) is the most Tarantinian movie that Quentin Tarantino has ever made. It’s also the Gone with the Wind of Nazi exploitation films—two and a half hours of carefully choreographed set pieces, long close-ups, and graphic violence.

The opening words, “Once Upon a Time… in Occupied France” set a properly mythic tone, and the rest of the fractured plot leads to an inventive conclusion.

The nominal star is Brad Pitt as Captain Aldo Raines, leader of a band of Jewish-American Nazi hunters working behind enemy lines. But the main character is actually SS Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz, a veteran Austrian actor who ought to get a Best Actor nomination for his work here). Landa is a charming monster who has made his reputation ferreting out and killing Jewish families.

The other main characters are Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), a young Jewish woman who runs a movie theater in Paris, and Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth), Raines’ most ferocious Nazi killer, nicknamed “The Jew Bear.” Then there’s the Nazi war hero (Daniel Bruhl), the German actress/spy (Diane Kruger) and the English film critic/spy (Michael Fassbender, channeling a young Sean Connery), and Goebbels and Goering and Hitler—all of them deliriously tossed together and seasoned with a score of borrowed bits. For my money, the film’s most indelible moment is a shot that’s bathed in red and played out over Giorgio Moroder’s eerie theme from Cat People.

It may not make any sense and it may seem out of place, but the combination of image and music hits precisely the right emotional note.

And, oh yes, the title. Tarantino has admitted his admiration for the 1978 film, Inglorious Bastards, but his film is not a remake. Beyond the GIs-behind-enemy-lines plot element, the new film has virtually nothing to do with the older. And so in the future, when people are looking for the DVD or checking both films out in books or online, the titles will be separate.

And, one more thing, much as I love the home viewing experience, this is a big screen movie. See it at the best theater you can find.

We like to think that if a spaceship filled with aliens arrived on earth, it would be a chance for enlightenment, a moment of grace.
More likely, the scenario envisioned in the ingenious District 9 would come to pass. And it ain’t pretty.

It’s 1984 in Johannesburg and a space ship has hovered over the city and stalled. On board are aliens—almost a million of them, scared and hungry—who are rounded up into a ghetto-like area (District 9), where they’re monitored by a paramilitary group, the MNU. (The MNU is particularly interested in the alien's sophisticated weaponry, which can only be fired by those with alien DNA.)

The public’s initial curiosity about the aliens, nicknamed “Prawns” because of their resemblance to the shell fish, eventually turns to suspicion, revulsion, and cries of “send the Prawns home.” Nigerian gangsters have descended upon District 9 to search for weapons and provide black market cat food (an alien favorite) and interspecies prostitution.

Now, 20 years have passed and the residents of Johannesburg want the Prawns out of their city, so the MNU will have to evict them—a formality that alien rights groups insist upon—and herd them into a remote concentration camp.

All of this is explained matter-of-factly, documentary-style, in District 9’s riveting opening minutes. We also meet the unfailingly cheerful Wikus Van De Merwe (newcomer Sharlto Copely, who’s just perfect), a midlevel bureaucrat for the MNU, who is assigned the unenviable task of handing out the eviction notices...
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Even though I haven’t actually read "The Time Traveler’s Wife," I can definitively say this: The book is better than the movie.

How do I know this? Because Audrey Niffenegger’s novel inspired a devoted following. The film is about as inspiring as an AT&T commercial.

Clearly, in telling this story of a little girl named Clare (played as an adult by Rachel McAdams) who meets a time-traveling man named Henry (Eric Bana) and loves him from then on, the filmmakers were going for gushy, swoony Ghost-style romance. But something is missing. There’s the inherent flaw in the film’s structure: Henry’s disappearing act (his time traveling stints come on like seizures; he can’t control them) is more frustrating than tragic; and his romance with Clare is never allowed to blossom on screen—the moment we begin to see some chemistry or connection between them—poof!—he’s gone.

Some blame has to lie in the performances...
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Bandslam is better than it has any right to be. After all, its premise is strictly out of the Disney playbook: Geeky teen loner becomes the manager of a band, and finds himself torn between two girls, the band’s (gorgeous) rebellious lead singer and the (equally gorgeous) bookish outsider he’s partnered with in his human studies class.

And yet . . . I sensed something was up with Bandslam right out of the gate, when our hero Will (Gaelen Connell) wrote a letter to David Bowie. (Had his letter been to Nickelback, I would've known I was in for a long night.) Turns out, Will has been writing letters to Bowie for a while now, undeterred by the fact that Bowie never writes back.

My second clue that Bandslam had a few tricks up its sleeve was when I saw that Lisa Kudrow was cast as Will’s mother. You simply don’t hire an actress as wonderfully offbeat and vivid as Kudrow unless you’ve got a good reason. And Kudrow gets to do some fine work as the protective mother—yes, she smothers a bit, but we eventually find out it’s with good reason.

Vanessa Hudgens, she of High School Musical (and inappropriate photos) fame, plays the weirdo shy girl Sa5m (“the 5 is silent,” she says—amusingly), who has a hard time expressing happiness. Hudgens would be a lot more convincing if she didn’t still have her perfect, shiny Disney hair...
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When I heard that Meryl Streep had been cast as Julia Child in Nora Ephron’s new biopic, Julie & Julia, I put my grouchy pants on. Fine-featured, delicate Streep as Amazonian, earthy Julia? Sacre bleu!

Well, score one for Meryl.

Streep is absolutely winning in this part, which chronicles Julia’s move to France in 1949 and her two greatest love affairs: with French cuisine and with her loyal, doting husband Paul (Stanley Tucci, who after The Devil Wears Prada is becoming Streep’s true partner in charm.) She gets the trilling voice right, the towering stature, and the sensual pleasure Julia took in food. What’s more, she captures the great chef’s joie de vivre. There’s a buoyancy to Streep’s performance that is completely irresistible...
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The romantic comedy gets deconstructed in the endearingly quirky (500) Days of Summer.
Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt) is a hopeless romantic who writes greeting cards for a living. Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is the new girl in the office, with whom he is immediately smitten.
Here’s the twist: We are told, right off the bat, that things will not end well for our young hero. “This is not a romantic comedy,” the droll voiceover informs us. Instead, this is a breakdown of one young man’s particular heartbreak, with an unusual storytelling device: Tom and Summer’s romance is recounted out of chronology.
Instead of being confusing, the conceit adds dimensions of humor and insight to the tale...
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Until now, there hasn’t been a great film about the ongoing war in Iraq. The contenders have either been too mawkish (Grace is Gone), too depressing (In the Valley of Elah), or too polemical (Stop-Loss).
But Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is more than just the first great film about Gulf II. It deserves to be ranked among the best war films of all time.
What really sets the film apart is how Bigelow shows the agonizing paradox of war—how you vacillate between numbing boredom and the electric-shock terror of fighting for your life—and her film is about falling in love with the adrenalin rush (“war is a drug” reads a quote as the film begins). It’s about how there’s a certain almost comforting clarity to life in combat—it’s all instinct and reaction, life or death. When you’re fighting for your life, everything else recedes into the background...
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Over the years, the Harry Potter series has attracted some of Great Britian’s greatest acting talent. Imelda Staunton, Emma Thompson, Helena Bonham Carter, David Thewlis, Kenneth Branaugh, and Gary Oldman have all appeared in the films. And Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, and Michael Gambon (who replaced the late Richard Harris) are series regulars. (It’s to JK Rowling’s endless credit that she has written characters so juicy, these scene stealers simply can’t resist.)
But what I truly marvel at is the casting of the three main children. After all, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, were all about 11 years old when they were first cast in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. And I have a hunch that if the producers were recasting the film eight years later, they’d assemble the exact same group. Radcliffe’s role is the toughest—he has to make Harry virtuous and earnest without being dull. But Radcliffe has a natural heroism about him, an understated confidence, and he plays Harry with a slight hint of sadness that adds depth. (After all, it’s tough being the Chosen One). Emma Watson was a pretty little girl, but she has turned into a real beauty—hey, if you’ve followed the careers of child stars, you know that was no guarantee. She’s also a fine actress who ably projects Hermione’s defiant intelligence (as a Muggle-born wizard she has to be twice as good as her classmates).  Grint has become a master clown (as the somewhat ungainly Ron Weasley, he bears a lot of the film’s physical comedy) and a completely lovable best friend for Harry. You might as well throw young Tom Felton into the mix. He was already a touch creepy and leonine as young Draco Malfoy—and he’s aged perfectly; he’s like a sinister teen Julian Sand.
I talk about the young cast because I think they get to do some of their best work in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. They’re true teenagers now—facing the romantic yearnings and the insecurities and the malleable sense of identity that comes with that age. Once again, the great wizard Dumbledore (Gambon) has “asked too much of” Harry...
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State of Play (PG-13) reviewed by Max Weiss [Now Available on DVD]

As State of Play began, I had an unexpected surge of wistfulness. After all, this film is about an intrepid newspaper reporter (Russell Crowe) investigating the suspicious death of a pretty young Capitol Hill staffer. But in this world of blogs and Twitter, aren’t movies where the hero is a reporter about to go the way of the dodo bird?
Happily, State of Play rather ingeniously sidesteps this reality by making sure that Crowe’s Cal McAffrey is constantly being reminded that he’s an endangered species. He’s forced to work with a rising star young blogger (Rachel McAdams), his tough publisher (Helen Mirren) is bemoaning a gimmicky corporate-fueled redesign, and he has to fend off accusations of irrelevance from his subjects.
“When it’s real news, it breaks through the gossip,” Cal insists (or something to that effect)—and I was surprised my colleagues at the screening didn’t give him a standing ovation.
Of course, State of Play isn’t really about the state of newspapers today, but it’s a nice little addition to the script (based on the acclaimed British mini series of the same name) which is essentially a good, old fashioned conspiracy thriller...
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Lately, it seems that every comic book movie down the pike can be subtitled: Or How Our Hero Got His Angst On. At this point, they should really rename the whole genre bummer books.
So, as X-Men Origins: Wolverine begins, we watch as the child version of our mutant hero...
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