Gory time: Danny Huston preys on a small town in 30 Days of Night.

Capsules

New Releases

Control
Directed by Anton Corbijn
B-
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Oct. 26

Released as we (impatiently) await the wack experiments of I’m Not There and Walk Hard, Control is the musical biopic par excellence—almost. The subject is Ian Curtis (unknown Sam Riley), the doom-and-gloom lead singer of Joy Division who hung himself on the cusp of their first American tour and the release of their second album Closer.

Curtis was already covered, if briefly, in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, which wisely offered up no answers for his suicide. Who could ever know what was going through his mind? Best not to try. Control does try, in a very Psych 101 fashion, and even has that whole tiresome, reductionist rise-and-fall trajectory about to be heroically eviscerated by Walk Hard.

What it also has, fortunately, is director Anton Corbijn. A photographer and sometime music video maker best known for the cover of U2’s The Joshua Tree, Corbijn snapped Joy Division back in the day, usually framing them in stark B&W images against the industrial bleakness of their native Manchester.

For the most part, Matt Greenhalgh’s script for Control—based on Touching From a Distance by Curtis’ widow Deborah, here played by Samantha Morton—is nothing to write home about. But Corbijn films it like one of his JD photos come to life. Like Riley’s Curtis, we’re trapped in a terminally gray and foreboding wasteland—virtually a postapocalyptic vision.

This isn’t just a stylistic gimmick—it’s a sensibility, and it seeps into the film’s every pore. Joy Division’s star may rise, but their fame is almost entirely off-screen. Corbijn films the whole of their first TV appearance head-on inside the studio, stressing the disconnect between their performance and those watching them.

We see only a couple live performances, and they’re either unbearably raucous or end with the epileptic Curtis suffering a seizure. Shy of scoring a hot Belgian mistress (Alexandra Maria Lara), Curtis never gets to enjoy the benefits of his music, or escape the stark ’Scope B&W. It’s all the same, only worse.

Marky narc: Wahlberg (left) again plays a cop, here with Alex Veadov, in We Own the Night.

Corbijn lets this flatness eat away at what should be a standard music biopic, though surely even Walk the Line’s James Mangold would have resisted cueing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” when Riley casually informs Morton he no longer loves her. Likewise, only a sadist would play the devastating “Atmosphere” (“Don’t walk away/ In silence ... ”) after Curtis has strung up the noose. As Curtis, Riley is like a half-formed human, struggling to learn how to exist. For better and worse, so too is Control.

Leroy “Nicky” Barnes has been called many things. The Black Godfather. The Al Capone of Harlem. And yes, Mr. Untouchable. His multimillion-dollar heroin empire in 1970s New York has been immortalized in rap songs, the media and now movies. (Cuba Gooding Jr. plays him in next month’s American Gangster).

Today Barnes has a $1 million contract on his head. Or so Marc Levin’s documentary brags before showing Barnes on film in a secret location. Clutching the bosom of the witness protection program, the crime boss-turned-informant can’t show his face (likely altered by surgery), so the film dwells on him fiddling with a cigar, a chessboard and a bullet while recounting his exploits.

He’s not alone. The cast of interviewees includes Barnes’ former lieutenants and dealers, his ex-wife, his lawyer and the undercover DEA agent and informant who helped bring him down. Together they tell of a Harlem drug addict who used his canny business sense to become the mafia’s go-to guy for flooding black neighborhoods with heroin.

Barnes weaseled his way out of trials until Jimmy Carter read the New York Times Magazine cover story that coined “Mr. Untouchable.” Laws were passed that would keep Barnes behind bars, and he was soon found guilty of various drug conspiracy charges and sentenced to life. Then he sang—not to cut a deal but to exact revenge on his partners, who’d already begun to undermine him. His federal testimony led to scores of arrests and convictions, and Barnes served only 21 years.

Levin navigates the film stylishly to a soundtrack of vintage funk, but it’d be just another nostalgic rise-and-fall saga (think: Blow) if not for Barnes, who shows no remorse for the killings he ordered, the wife and friends he betrayed and the damage wrought by all that heroin. Rather, he quotes the Koran, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and Moby Dick, spouting self-aggrandizing, hypocritical decrees.

It’s scary—and fascinating—just how hardened Barnes is. “I’m out. They’re in,” he says of his old gang, some of whom are still doing time. He uses the word “innovation” when describing his approach to dealing, and fondly recalls womanizing and drug-enhanced orgasms. The film doesn’t attempt to moralize, but simply lets Barnes dig himself in deeper.

On a dimly lit Connecticut road, a cute little boy—busy idyllically releasing fireflies from a jar—is plowed over by a marauding SUV, which then peels off. The deceased’s father (Joaquin Phoenix) waits for the police to locate this hit-and-runner, his blood ever boiling, while the hit-and-runner himself (Mark Ruffalo) is eaten away by guilt, even as he’s unable to summon the courage to turn himself in.

Such is the plot of Reservation Road, ostensibly a stark, heady exploration of justice, grief and guilt. But what if I told you that in addition to all this, Ruffalo was a lawyer and he just so happened to wind up assigned to Phoenix, ostensibly to help him find (gasp!) himself? Not needlessly contrivance-heavy enough? How about having Ruffalo’s ex-wife (Mira Sorvino) be the dead kid’s beloved piano teacher? Sure, that’s a superfluous twist, but at least it’s not as insulting as the inhumanly prosaic reason Ruffalo had for running after hitting: He didn’t want to be late for dropping off his estranged son at Sorvino’s house after a day at the ballpark. His intentions were pure!

Directed like a perfunctory TV movie by Terry George of the overrated Hotel Rwanda, Reservation Road actually does make an attempt at thoughtfulness. But it’s almost as frustratingly ambivalent as Ruffalo—it can’t decide if it wants to be an exploration of grief and guilt or a monumentally silly potboiler. Sometimes George carefully limns the different forms of grief adopted by Phoenix and wife Jennifer Connelly—she retreating from society, he into anger over the inconclusiveness of his son’s death. At other times he’s just waiting for Phoenix—who lets his bloodlust be coddled by the Internet’s endless supply of enablers (and gunsellers)—to snap.

Running a too-efficient 102 minutes, Reservation Road mechanically builds to a point that, while noble and right, is unoriginal and too easily earned—treating its characters less like human beings wrestling with emotions than pawns in a thesis that’s already been proven by many others. The actors give it their all, but their characters are at most two-note, and usually just one. Ruffalo squirms. Phoenix fumes. Connelly screams. Sorvino, given little to do, does little, despite this being the most exposure she’s had since winning her Oscar.

In a season that’s already seen two movies about vigilantism, one ambivalent on the subject (Death Sentence), the other gung-ho (The Brave One), it’s nice to see one come down hard on the anti side. But of the three, it’s also the dopiest.

Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’ book O Jerusalem!, which recounts the creation and early days of Israel, runs some 640 pages. O Jerusalem, the loose film adaptation, runs 100 minutes. Hey, a Netflix rental is cheaper than a Cliffs Notes pamphlet.

But history (and an exclamation point) isn’t the only thing Elie Choroaqui’s clumsy film version whittles down. Trying to rectify Israeli-Palestinian relations without betraying the reasons behind the rift has been a favorite of documentaries like Promises and Channels of Rage and the forthcoming fiction film The Bubble. But O Jerusalem is the first to milk it for hoary melodrama.

Following in the footsteps of The Fox and the Hound and “Ebony and Ivory,” O Jerusalem frames its story around opposites, namely a Jew (JJ Feild) and an Arab (Saïd Taghmaoui) who become fast friends in America before heading off to witness the birth pangs of Israel in British-ruled Palestine. Once the U.N. recognizes Israel, the two separate, both taking up arms for their respective sides.

As Israel explodes into decades of disarray, O Jerusalem struggles to remain bipartisan, though always pro-Israel. As Feild helpfully puts it, “A Jew kills an Arab. An Arab kills a Jew. Blood causes more blood, pain more pain. Hatred grows.” Perhaps with a longer running time and a bigger budget—say, the three and a half hours Otto Preminger had with 1960’s star-studded Exodus—O Jerusalem would find the breathing room to introduce some subtlety, or at least offer more than a superficial, if heartfelt, plea for peace.

Perhaps this fantasy version would keep the dialogue from being full of either intonations (“The state will carry the name ... of Israel”) or platitudes (“We are a nation of peace!”). Ian Holm occasionally saunters in as prime minister David Ben Gurion, with wild electrified hair, to further the exposition along for those whose knowledge of Israel’s genesis is minimal at best.

Chouraqui doesn’t shy away from violence, but the CGI is distractingly cheesy and his staging cheesier; this is the kind of film where one man cluelessly asks where so-and-so is only to be greeted with silence, his smile dropping before his body follows suit. It’s always great to see Taghmaoui, the terrific character actor of Hate, Three Kings and the upcoming The Kite Runner. But his committed turn strikes the only note of verisimilitude in a film that should’ve stayed a dry history tome.

Late in the redemption drama Bella, two estranged brothers—one a cook, the other a restaurant owner—reunite when the former prepares him breakfast. This scene should sound familiar. After all, that’s exactly how Big Night ends. Well, maybe not exactly.

Big Night did it all in a single memorable take—from the cracking open of eggs to a sudden, dominant hug between brothers Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci. Bella, meanwhile, cuts it up, and lets the big hug turn into a sloppy, hey-no-hard-feelings shrug of a moment that carries zero weight, essentially writing off everything that happened in the movie prior.

The side-by-side comparison reveals the difference between a bold, original movie like Big Night and a phony, Sundance Channel late-night timeslot filler like Bella, which is easy to forget as you’re watching it.

On the other hand, Big Night didn’t have a capital-A agenda up its sleeve. Granted, it takes a while to sniff out what the film is definitively about, mostly thanks to some of the clumsiest quickie flashback moments in the dubious method’s history. Eduardo Verástegui (Chasing Papi) plays a scraggly bearded cook with a coyly withheld mysterious past, who toils at an upscale Mexican restaurant run by his soulless, whip-cracking brother (Manny Perez). After Perez cruelly fires a frequently tardy waitress (Hilary Swank doppelganger Ali Landry) who happens to have just found out she’s pregnant, Verástegui walks off during the lunch blitz to spend the quintessential New York day with her.

In between taking in the city’s diverse cultures (among them a literally show-stopping subway percussion group), Landry monologues about her rock-hard decision to get an abortion. Verástegui, in turn, monologues about the coyly withheld event that made him grow his scraggly beard. And one or two monologues later—plus one jaw-droppingly cliched montage of Verástegui’s family at the dinner table—it becomes clear this is actually a histrionic cautionary tale about the vileness of abortions, carefully disguised as a cutesy New York romantic drama.

Bella was distributed by indie outfit Roadside Attractions, but it’s so nakedly coquettish about its message that you have to wonder why it wasn’t nabbed by one of those shadowy Christian distributors who sneaked the Left Behind series, End of the Spear and The Ultimate Gift into the nation’s theaters. At least that would’ve been honest.

Not Reviewed

Saw IV
Jigsaw and his apprentice Amanda are dead—and yet, the horrifically contrived scenarios live on! (Opens Fri., Oct. 26.)

Ongoing

Pregnant pause: Reese Witherspoon attempts to find her terror-suspect husband in Rendition.

Across the Universe
Breathtakingly, humorlessly earnest and so “far out” it deserves its own zip code, Julie Taymor’s epic, astonishingly misbegotten ode to every ’60s cliche imaginable is a musical about attractively blank characters with amusing names, all of whom can express their deepest, innermost feelings only by belting out Beatles songs. Memo from an aging Gen-Xer to baby boomers everywhere: We get it, and we’re bored. D+ (S.B.)

The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Writer/director Andrew Dominik’s endlessly delayed follow-up to his 2000 cult smash Chopper is a maddening, mesmerizing wonder. We begin after the glory days are already long over, with big brother Frank James (Sam Shepard) retiring and heading east, leaving his puzzling younger sibling to fend for himself. Uprooting his family to skitter all over Missouri under the pseudonym “Thomas Howard,” Brad Pitt’s Jesse James is restless and fretful—a man dwarfed by his own outsized reputation. Twitchy, unnerving and slowly eaten away by paranoia, Pitt has never been better. Then there’s Bob Ford, portrayed by Casey Affleck in a performance so creepy and beady-eyed, it’s an icky revelation. Bob’s grown up idolizing the legendary gunslinger and desperately pines for sidekick status. But when Bob’s genuine affections become fodder for Jesse’s cheap giggles, all that adoration curdles into something more sinister—sort of like Mark David Chapman 100 years ahead of schedule. A (S.B.)

The Bourne Ultimatum
Director Paul Greengrass is back for The Bourne Ultimatum, a large chunk of which takes place between The Bourne Supremacy’s despairing Moscow climax and that feel-good studio-mandated N.Y.C. epilogue that never felt quite right. Having lost the one person he cared about, and still tormented by memories of murder, Jason’s heading home to confront the men who made him what he is. This is whip-smart genre filmmaking with a seething political undercurrent keyed directly into the here and now. The thrill lies in watching Jason strategize and outwit his would-be captors, improvising his way out of impossible situations with a Boy Scout’s resourcefulness and lightning-fast moves. The Bourne Ultimatum isn’t just the best movie of this trilogy—it’s one of the best films of the year. A (S.B.)

The Brave One
In this violent revenge flick Jodie Foster plays Erica Bain, a poetic New York radio host forced to cope as a victim of a senseless crime. Left completely alone and without comfort, Erica decides she must illegally buy a gun. So begins a long string of questionable vigilante-style murders packaged as a tale of healing and empowerment. The film is odious, not just because its cheap premise wastes a solid cast (which also includes Terrence Howard as a detective investigating the bloody corpses Erica leaves behind), but also because it maintains an air of self-righteousness all the while. There’s a weak attempt to wring a morality play out of Erica’s rampage, but Erica seems too comfortable with her role as self-elected executioner. D (Philip Malaczewski)

The Comebacks
A spoof of inspirational sports movies from the makers of Wedding Crashers. (Not reviewed.)

The Darjeeling Limited
Francis (Owen Wilson), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Jack (Jason Schwartzman) are the Whitman brothers, who haven’t spoken to one another since the death of their father one year ago. Francis, the domineering eldest, just had a nasty close call on his motorcycle, and has thus come to the conclusion that he and his wayward siblings must immediately repair their relationship and, while they’re at it, also “find spiritual enlightenment” in India. For the first time in his career, director Wes Anderson seems to be playing pain for real, without any sight gags or ironic distance to cushion the blow. The filmmaker’s typical fixations get a thorough auto-critique in his fifth film—such an evolutionary leap forward that it’s already being slighted in certain cineaste circles as “the Wes Anderson movie for people who don’t like Wes Anderson movies.” A- (S.B.)

Wack widow: Halle Berry loses her husband and seeks consolation from his best friend in Things We Lost in the Fire.

Eastern Promises
David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises begins with back-to-back blood-lettings: first an awkward throat-slit, then a severely pregnant 14-year-old who bleeds from between her legs onto a pharmacy floor. The girl perishes, leaving behind only her baby and a diary. Hoping to keep the baby out of the adoption bureaucracy (and perhaps for herself), nurse Naomi Watts seeks the mommy’s past and winds up unwittingly entangled in the Russian mob, lorded over by grandfatherly psycho Armin Mueller-Stahl, hotheaded but ineffectual son Vincent Cassell and their upwardly mobile driver Viggo Mortensen. Promises pulls in several directions and never completely gels, even as it’s held together with a certain confident coolness. Mortensen delivers a carefully modulated performance. B (M.P.)

Elizabeth: The Golden Age
This soppy sequel finds our Virgin Queen (Cate Blanchett) staring down a convoluted assassination attempt by some nasty Spanish Catholics. Their goal is to snuff out our gal and make way for her cousin Mary Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton). But who has time for such throne-room intrigue when love is in the air? The hilariously costumed Clive Owen offers up an embarrassing turn as Sir Walter Raleigh. The daffiness only increases once Elizabeth dons a suit of armor and delivers a St. Crispin’s Day speech that somebody seems to have forgotten to finish writing after the third or fourth line, and The Golden Age finally explodes into incoherence once Raleigh takes down the Spanish Armada single-handedly. C- (S.B.)

Feel the Noise
An aspiring rapper (Omarion Grandberry) flees trouble in Harlem and winds up in Puerto Rico with his estranged father, where he finds salvation in reggaeton and dreams of becoming a star. (Not reviewed.)

The Final Season
Sean Astin stars in another redemptive sports drama, in which he must lead a small-town baseball team to a championship season after a government move threatens their tradition of dominance. (Not reviewed.)

For the Bible Tells Me So
Christian and Jewish scholars take the oft-quoted “antigay” verses of the Bible and put them into historical context. But while For the Bible Tells Me So methodically demolishes all the arguments for homophobia, both spiritual and temporal, it succeeds most effectively on the anecdotal and emotional level. The documentary presents Christian gays and lesbians as brave, decent and honorable people. And we also see their so-called Christian detractors in their true colors: ignorant (of both science and the Bible), hate-filled and completely un-Christlike. And no, it isn’t “balanced.” No argument in favor of truth, reason and tolerance needs to be. B+ (Steven Wells)

The Game Plan
A football player (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is approached by a 7-year-old girl who claims to be his daughter. (Not reviewed.)

Good Luck Chuck
There’s something really, really unfunny about Dane Cook. (Not reviewed.)

Gone Baby Gone
Soulful private investigator Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and his significant other Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) are the kind of low-rent gumshoes best employed by collection agents looking for folks who skipped payments on their jet skis. But when a 4-year-old girl is abducted from a neighboring housing project, their associations with Boston’s shady underworld provide the kind of leads that cops can’t scrape up in such closeted, tribal communities. Stepping behind the camera for this taut, engrossing adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Beantown potboiler, Ben Affleck has delivered a surprisingly moody and evocative thriller awash in ethical gray areas and convincing local color. After a stunning first hour, the preposterousness of Lehane’s convoluted plotline bogs down the film’s second half, but Affleck wows with his closing. B (S.B.)

The Great World of Sound
Working for the slimy fly-by-night office park record label from which this picture takes its title, failed disc jockey Martin (Pat Healy) and the boisterous huckster Clarence (Kene Holliday) travel around the countryside setting up some seriously awkward and shoddy motel room auditions, promising to produce demo discs for aspiring young singers who hope to become the next big thing, while simultaneously gouging them of their life savings on overhead “studio fees.” It’s a scam nearly as old as the music business itself, but what’s fresh here is director Craig Zobel’s surprising sympathy for these devils. In its own peculiar and unassuming fashion, Great World of Sound is about that nagging, desperate universal need to become a part of something bigger, the desire to believe in dreams even when they’re obviously bullshit. A- (S.B.)

Halloween
Rob Zombie remakes the 1978 John Carpenter classic. (Not reviewed.)

The Heartbreak Kid
After a few defanged, curiously joke-free comedies, brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly attempt to reclaim their title as gross-out champions of the world with this unnecessary remake of Elaine May’s legendary 1972 squirm fest. Ben Stiller takes the Charles Grodin role, now transformed into a commitment-phobic sporting goods salesman who’s pushing 40 and still single. But once Stiller meets blond bombshell Lila (Cameron Diaz clone Malin Akerman), he’s suddenly rushing down the aisle at warp speed. Even though Stiller’s patented murmuring slow-burns are way overfamiliar, Akerman’s gung-ho performance scores some big laughs, while winning brownie points for sheer fearlessness. Unfortunately for all involved, our hero meets the girl of his dreams while on his honeymoon. The covert courtship is gooey and saccharine, so the movie pretty much rolls over and dies once Akerman’s been sidelined in the hotel bathroom with a sunburn. C (S.B.)

In the Valley of Elah
It’s 2004. TVs everywhere are blasting either Dubya’s empty bromides or John Kerry’s narcotic drone. Square-jawed war veteran Tommy Lee Jones gets a phone call bearing news that his soldier son, just back from Iraq, has gone mysteriously AWOL. Soon after Jones drives out to the New Mexico base, his son is found—but in the form of charred severed hands and a head. Jones takes on the investigation himself, eventually enlisting the aid of underutilized single-mom detective Charlize Theron. Meanwhile, Jones receives reconstructed video files from his son’s mobile that reveal oblique but increasingly damning footage of soldierly misconduct. Elah’s central purpose is clear, and not unworthy of praise: depicting the egregious psychological toll the mishandled Iraq War has had on soldiers, effectively turning the “support the troops” line back on the pro-war crowd. But like Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center, Paul Haggis’ Crash follow-up is terrible in a completely different way than anticipated. It’s merely a lousy, poorly plotted procedural with the topicality awkwardly (and cynically) grafted on. C- (M.P.)

Into the Wild
In 1990, upon graduating from Emory University, Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) donated his life savings to Oxfam, burned his Social Security card, gave away all his possessions and disappeared down the highway into self-imposed obscurity. Rechristening himself “Alexander Supertramp,” McCandless longed to break the empty materialist shackles of modern life, attempting to live the kind of pure existence he’d only read about in books. Two years later he starved to death inside an abandoned bus, barely 20 miles from the Parks Highway in Alaska. Sean Penn’s fourth behind-the-camera effort is a deeply felt, startlingly personal work. It’s probably too long and, narrated with a bevy of highfalutin literary quotes and self-aggrandizing passages from McCandless’ diary, it teeters into pretentiousness more than once. But there’s something energizing about the picture’s wide-open heart-on-its-sleeve recklessness, its embrace of the landscapes and the filmmaker’s refusal to dismiss our hero’s grandiose, romantic notions. A- (S.B.)

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
If you know Jeff Garlin only from his role as Larry David’s henpecked, compulsively masturbating manager on Curb Your Enthusiasm, chances are you’ll be taken aback by the sweetness of his delightful, if unfortunately titled, feature writing and directing debut. Garlin stars as James, the resident “fat guy” in Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe. Pushing 40, he still lives with his mother and has the worrisome habit of confessing to far too many people that he hasn’t had sex in five years. Most of the movie is spent watching James get dumped—by girlfriends, managers, agents, casting directors and pretty much every possible employer in Illinois. Sounds like a drag, but somehow Garlin maintains a buoyant, humanistic tone throughout the parade of humiliations. It’s an endearing little movie with a great big heart. B+ (S.B.)

The Jane Austen Book Club

A group of women start a book club to discover Jane Austen, and their lives begin echoing those of her characters. Starring Maria Bello and Emily Blunt. (Not reviewed.)

The Kingdom
Named for and set largely in Saudi Arabia, the film begins with a zippy history of the country’s oil-laden relationship with the U.S. After that comes the first of many shocks: American civilians are machine-gunned down at a housing compound in Riyadh. Enter special agent Ron Fluery (Jaime Foxx) of the FBI’s Rapid Deployment Unit, who muscles his way through red tape for a chance to personally hunt down the terrorists responsible. The Kingdom’s first and third acts are seared with violence—bombings, a torture scene, a kidnapping and much worse—and the second is a whodunit in the mold of a TV procedural. The hardass, fast-quippingcharacters don’t have much depth, but sure are entertaining. Despite its flaws, it’s more powerful and rabble-rousing than most of what Hollywood churns out each year. B (D.W.)

Kurt Cobain: About a Son
The idea is bold and simple: no Nirvana footage, no Nirvana songs and no Nirvana pictures, at least till the final 30 seconds. Till then, it’s just Cobain’s own voice, culled from more than 25 hours of phone interviews done by journo Michael Azerrad. Director AJ Schnack more than makes up for the lack of aural Nirvana with an evocative lineup of songs Cobain listened to and sometimes covered (the Vaselines, Bowie, etc.). And then there’s what’s actually on-screen. Recognizing that the allure is largely aural, Schnack decks the film out in time-lapsed shots of streets, clouds, lakes or contemporary hipsters staring at the camera. These sights have their arresting, hypnotic quality, but they too often feel incidental and detached in the wrong way. More than once they reduce Cobain to some kind of spiritual overseer of culture—and guess how he’d feel about that. C+ (M.P.)

Lars and the Real Girl
Lars loves a doll. Not a blow-up doll, but one of those anatomically correct mannequin sex dolls. Granted, this could make for a disturbing arthouse drama, but Lars and the Real Girl moves like a comedy, wringing unlikely and uncomfortable laughs from a quiet study of loneliness. Ryan Gosling, the best and most convincing young actor in recent memory, carries this story, appearing in nearly every frame and never once releasing his tractor-beam grip on the audience. Screenwriter Nancy Oliver, a former writer on Six Feet Under, spins a wistfully funny parable around the familiar structure of an American indie film. Directed by Craig Gillespie—who gave us Mr. Woodcock, of all things—Lars and the Real Girl is cute, subtle and unexpectedly moving, due in no small part to the eerie depth of Gosling’s performance. A- (D.W.)

Lust, Caution
The film’s homeland of China predictably sliced out the steamier parts from Ang Lee’s latest, namely the headline-grabbing stumping sessions between spellbinding newcomer Tang Wei, as a resistance fighter in Japan-occupied Shanghai during the ’40s, and Tony Leung as her target—the much-feared head of the secret police. Lee and writers James Schamus and Wang Hui-Ling are patient, detailed filmmakers whose medium probably should be the novel, and for the first hour and 45 they’re a bit too restrained and middlebrow to let the material soar. But once Leung literally takes Wei, in a scene that repeatedly crosses the boundaries of good taste, they finally loosen their ties and jump in. By then it’s a touch too late, but they summon up a tight final hour, plus two incredible lead perfs. B- (M.P.)

Michael Clayton
Another hit in exec producer George Clooney’s recent run of politically savvy pictures, Michael Clayton provides the Cloonster with his meatiest role yet, as a slick fixer for a massive Manhattan law firm—the kind of smiling, shadowy figure who works behind the scenes and cleans up the mess before it makes the papers. But when an esteemed colleague (the terrific Tom Wilkinson) goes off his meds, grows a conscience and threatens to botch a massive class-action suit regarding a carcinogen-laced weed-killing spray, Clayton finds his loyalties tested, and for the first time starts wondering how he let himself become a smooth-talking janitor for the powerful. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a movie star. B+ (S.B.)

Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint
A fable of an 11th-century Tibetan boy who learns black magic to exact revenge on members of his family and, after seeking enlightenment, eventually becomes a spiritual leader. (Not reviewed.)

Mr. Woodcock
Seann William Scott plays a self-help author intent on stopping his mother (Susan Sarandon) from marrying his former nemesis—his high school gym teacher Mr. Woodcock (Billy Bob Thornton). (Not reviewed.)

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
A doc chronicling the life of the singer/songwriter/activist, with appearances by Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Natalie Maines, Tom Paxton, and Peter, Paul and Mary. (Not reviewed.)

Rendition
Director Gavin Hood’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Tsotsi is all about our nation’s lovely practice of secretly transporting terror suspects to undisclosed foreign lands, where they’re subject to far more innovative forms of questioning than the “quaint” old Geneva Conventions will allow within these particular borders. Besides the profound lack of drama and generally arrogant air of Oscar-grubbing self-righteousness, what Rendition suffers from most is an infuriating lack of specificity. These characters have been given vague platforms instead of human behavior, and they wander stiffly through the frame, reciting talking-points memos in lieu of actual dialogue. What a waste. D+ (S.B.)

Resident Evil: Extinction
The final installment of the trilogy based on the popular video game. (Not reviewed.)

Rush Hour 3
On the heels of Brett Ratner’s billion-dollar-director day, declared so by a Variety ad celebrating the cumulative gross of his seven feature films, the Hollywood wunderkind has this to say: “It took 20 years to build a pyramid, 14 years to build Mt. Rushmore, 13 years to lose my virginity and six years to get Chris Tucker to make Rush Hour 3.” Let’s hope it was all worth it. (Not reviewed.)

The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
Based on the novels of Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising follows a boy who discovers he’s the last of a group of evil-fighting warriors, and must use his powers to save the world. (Not reviewed.)

Superbad
Graduation looms large on the horizon for Seth (Jonah Hill). He’s already sick with separation anxiety, as his best friend and constant companion Evan (Michael Cera) just got into Dartmouth, while Seth barely squeaked his way into State. A typical Friday night of Web-surfing and sneaking Dad’s beers gets postponed by something that has never happened before to our dorky twosome: an honest-to-God party invitation. From pretty girls! The only catch is Seth and Evan are asked to supply all the alcohol. The most cutting and straightforward teen sex comedy since Fast Times at Ridgemont High, it’s a dirty movie with an overabundance of empathy and heart. A (S.B.)

Sydney White
A modern retelling of Snow White with Amanda Bynes as a banished sorority girl who teams up with a band of dorks to take over student council. (Not reviewed.)

Things We Lost in the Fire
Halle Berry stars as a widow who invites her deceased husband’s troubled best friend (Benicio Del Toro) to live with her and her two children. (Not reviewed.)

30 Days of Night
Josh Hartnett and Melissa George are among the townfolk of remote Barrow, Alaska, who, during the region’s annual month without sunlight, are attacked by a gang of vampires. (Not reviewed.)

3:10 to Yuma
Based on an Elmore Leonard short story, the gritty, bare-bones oater gets a cluttered update full of annoying modern screenwriting conventions, extraneous characters, laboriously overexplained back-stories and superfluous action sequences. But the story’s unshakable pull somehow survives the clunky translation. The movie is exciting even when it’s stumbling all over the place. Christian Bale gives yet another ferociously committed performance as Dan Evans, a down-on-his-luck rancher who somehow finds himself stuck watching over Russell Crowe’s silver-tongued malevolent jailbird, waiting for that fabled prison train from which the tale takes its title. The film’s flaws can’t detract from the pure pleasure to be had in watching these two actors clearly having a blast, circling and sniffing around each another, trying to figure out what makes the other guy tick. B (S.B.)

Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?
Adapted by Perry from his stage play, the film follows four couples on a reunion trip to Colorado, where one couple’s infidelity causes the others to reevaluate their own marriages. Starring Perry, Janet Jackson and Jill Scott. (Not reviewed.)

We Own the Night
Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg star in James Gray’s third film about families joined in crime. Phoenix gets front and center this time as a budding nightclub owner in 1988 Brooklyn, in a bit too deep with Russian mobsters and their smuggled drugs. Wahlberg plays his cop brother and Robert Duvall their chief-of-police father. Guess who doesn’t mind playing favorites? We Own the Night is so humor-averse that the closest thing to comic relief (Danny Hoch) gets the ever-living shit kicked out of him, but it compensates with an absorbing seriousness. But Gray also lets fly with two of the year’s most kinetic set pieces: a drug bust gone wildly awry and, soon after, a claustrophobic car chase set in a rainstorm and entirely within one vehicle. Kick. Ass. B- (M.P.)