Category Archives: Reviews

REVIEW: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Directed by: Tomas Alfredson
Written by: Bridget O’Connor & Peter Straughan (screenplay), John le Carré (novel)
Starring: Gary Oldman, Tom Hardy, Colin Firth and John Hurt

If you’re not prepared to donate every ounce of your attention to this film, then do not bother watching it.  Tomas Alfredson’s adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is one of the twistiest films to come along in years.

Like he did in adapting the vampire thriller Let the Right One In, though, he takes those narrative thrills and restrains them within his deliberately arranged frames until the tension boils over.  There is only one “action” sequence in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and it’s the rather clumsily constructed assassination of a spy (Mark Strong) sent to Hungary to find out the identity of a mole within MI6 (the British equivalent of the CIA).

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REVIEW: Martha Marcy May Marlene

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Martha Marcy May Marlene
Directed by: Sean Durkin
Written by: Sean Durkin (screenplay)
Starring: Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes, Sarah Paulson and Hugh Dancy

Many prominent American indies have started to favor the Before/After plot device.  Blue Valentine and the more recent We Need To Talk About Kevin are both examples of that style being used as a substitution for substance.  Sean Durkin’s debut feature Martha Marcy May Marlene shows that device finally being used in excruciatingly well-done ways.

Along with Margin Call, this film about a young woman traumatized by her time in a cult marks the best American writer/director debut of 2011.  Durkin’s films is decidedly less slick than J.C. Chandor’s drama about the financial collapse in 2008, but they both become unflinchingly honest if very different portraits of American identity.  The point of relation in this film comes from Martha (Elizabeth Olsen), whose strength after escaping the cult seems impossibly strong.

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REVIEW: War Horse

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War Horse
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Lee Hall and Richard Curtis (screenplay), Michael Morpurgo (novel)
Starring: Jeremy Irvine, Peter Mullan, Emily Watson and Niels Arestrup

In his second movie of 2011 (released only a few days after The Adventures of Tintin), Steven Spielberg has made one of the most quietly beautiful films of the year and his career.  War Horse may lack the grand narrative spectacle that follows much of his other work, Tintin included, but its imagery is truly captivating.

From the pensive beginning and ending on the same British farm to the desecrated terrain of World War I battlefields, Spielberg films War Horse with the kind of steady hand that only experience can bring.  Instead of embracing new motion capture animation technology like he did with Tintin, here he meticulously recreates explosive battles without using special effects.  As if that weren’t enough, he has placed a horse at the center of his story, and it does not talk like it might in an animated film.

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REVIEW: Certified Copy

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Certified Copy
Directed by: Abbas Kiarostami
Written by: Abbas Kiarostami (screenplay)
Starring: Juliette Binoche and William Shimell

Romance in the movies typically unfolds or unravels before us; there are Meet Cutes and ugly break-ups.  Certified Copy, a masterful film from Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, is both of those things, and then inevitably neither of them.

The film chronicles the relationship between Elle (Juliette Binoche) and James (William Shimell), two people who seem to meet in Tuscany for some kind of gathering while James is on a book tour, and then as the movie progresses, you realize the true depth of their relationship.  At first it shares much in common with Richard Linkletter’s Before Sunset, but the true challenge of this film is filling in the back story, whereas Linkletter’s film was a sequel of sorts.

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REVIEW: Young Adult

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Young Adult
Directed by: Jason Reitman
Written by: Diablo Cody (screenplay)
Starring: Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson and Collette Wolf

Mavis Gary is one of the most fully realized movie characters in recent memory, and certainly of 2011.  In the span of Young Adult’s 90 minutes, Diablo Cody’s writing, Jason Reitman’s directing and Charlize Theron’s acting fuse together seamlessly to show us her demented, delusional inner workings.

In an early scene, Mavis is going to meet up with an old flame from high school named Buddy (Patrick Wilson).  She enters this small town bar with a tight, skimpy black outfit.  As she looks around the bar, judging every other patron there, the camera shifts to a POV shot as if asking us to judge them too.  When the waiter comes to her table, she rudely tells him to take back the silverware and bring her a drink. Buddy enters, and she lights up with a grotesque fakeness that she dons almost as often as her snide glare.

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REVIEW: We Need to Talk About Kevin

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We Need to Talk About Kevin
Directed by: Lynne Ramsay
Written by: Lynne Ramsay & Rory Kinnear (screenplay), Lionel Shriver (novel)
Starring: Tilda Swinton, John C. Reilly, Ezra Miller and Jasper Newell

Mothers are a fixture in many serial killer canons, in real life and in film.  Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho is probably the most infamous momma’s boy killer, though she never makes an actual appearance.  We Need to Talk About Kevin, a startling fever dream of a movie from Lynne Ramsay, examines the mother of a boy who locks his school up and kills several other students.

That mother, Eva Khatchadourian, is played by Tilda Swinton with exactly the kind of wayward complexity and urgency you expect from the great actress.  Ramsay assaults the viewer with a kaleidoscope of terror, as Eva’s life switches from her short-haired days raising her son Kevin (played as a troubled child by Rock Duer and Jasper Newell and as a creepy teen by Ezra Miller) to her mid-length days living in shame after his crime.

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REVIEW: The Adventures of Tintin

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The Adventures of Tintin
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Written by: Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish (screenplay), Hergé (comic)
Starring: Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig and Nick Frost

Steven Spielberg is back in rollicking good form after his three-year break following the unfortunate fourth Indiana Jones escapade with the jaw-dropping animated epic The Adventures of Tintin.  It comes as somewhat of a surprise that Spielberg aims a directorial rebound with motion-capture animation, and yet while you look at the gorgeously rendered surfaces and the extraordinarily lifelike human characters, it appears he has achieved his goal.

Like Martin Scorsese did with Hugo, Spielberg utilizes the latest 3D technology to adapt a family-friendly story of a young boy solving mysteries while at the same time paying homage to the art he loves so much.  Tintin is less a tribute to filmmakers past than it is to this directors’ past adventures, though, which is egotistical but nontheless pays off.

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REVIEW: Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol

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Mission: Impossible- Ghost Protocol
Directed by: Brad Bird
Written by: Josh Applebaum & André Nemec (screenplay)
Starring: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Paula Patton and Simon Pegg

Tom Cruise commits his body completely to a role, often at the expense of character.  Many of his most iconic performances, including this long-running gig as Ethan Hunt in the Mission: Impossible series, have him performing all the major action hero duties at a break neck pace.

In this latest installment, tacked with “Ghost Protocol” instead of the number 4, Cruise performs the biggest stunts of the series yet.  Brad Bird, director of Pixar films like The Incredibles and Ratatouille as well as lesser known ones like The Iron Giant, makes his live action debut and is tasked with controlling this chaos.

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REVIEW: Higher Ground

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Higher Ground
Directed by: Vera Farmiga
Written by: Carolyn S. Briggs and Tim Metcalfe (screenplay), Carolyn S. Briggs (novel)
Starring: Vera Farmiga, Joshua Leonard, John Hawkes and Taissa Farmiga

Vera Farmiga often has such a calming presence on a movie, which makes those times when emotions pour out of her all the more affecting.  In Higher Ground, she brings that talent not only as the movie’s star but as its director.  It is the story of the devout Christian woman Corinne and her lifelong grappling with faith.

Adapted by Carolyn S. Briggs and Tim Metcalfe from Briggs’ book This Dark World, Higher Ground transcends preaching to either side of the issue because nobody involved in its construction is laying judgment.  Corinne may be seen as a rebel by her congregation when she asks probing questions about the teachings of the Bible, but to an outsider in the audience they seem perfectly fine.

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REVIEW: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

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The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Directed by: David Fincher
Written by: Steve Zaillian (screenplay), Stieg Larsson (novel)
Starring: Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, Stellan Skarsgard and Christopher Plummer

Everything surrounding this American adaptation of a best-selling Swedish book seemed like a perfect fit.  Who better to chronicle a dark story about a serial killer that involves a clever computer nerd than David Fincher?  It’s a combination of everything he’s done so well as a director, from Zodiac to last year’s The Social Network.

Add in a cast full of talented character actors and a breakthrough star performance from the unknown actress Rooney Mara, and it sounds like a filmmaking and financial grand slam.  Though Fincher weaves his distinct visual pleasures through Steve Zaillian’s condensed/slightly altered version of Stieg Larsson’s bulky narrative, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a long movie filled with many names, twists and bursts of violence.

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