Holiday Movie Roundup
By RICHARD CORLISS, Belinda Luscombe
Would it were not so, but moviegoing is not about you or what you want. If that were the case, summer would not be fuller than a public pool on Labor Day with action movies but devoid of serious or thought-provoking films. And December would not be more crammed than a Wal-Mart sale bin with interesting, challenging cinematic options but almost empty of fare for the family. But because of some weird alchemy of awards season, cooler weather and the public's need to feel depressed at year's end, a lot of ambitious movies are coming out now. To help you navigate, film critic RICHARD CORLISS and Arts editor BELINDA LUSCOMBE have put together a guide to those you should catch, those you should skip and those that look promising.
PREVIEW
Sweeney Todd
Starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman. Directed by Tim Burton. Opens Dec. 21
Johnny Depp returns with director Tim Burton! Johnny Depp gets to murder people with much splatter! Johnny Depp sings! Let's face it, the curiosity meter on this one is turned to 11. And it was even before Depp got poliosis (that's the medical term for that goofy white forelock he's sporting).
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, as the full title has it, has quite a history. It's the film version of the hit Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical, which was based on a '70s play based on a 19th century melodrama. All of those appear to have drawn on an urban myth about a barber who found an unconventional use for his straight razors and then an even more unconventional use for the bodies of his victims.
It's always a little tricky negotiating the road from Broadway musical to major motion picture, strewn as it is with the burned-out hulks of vehicles like 2005's The Producers and Rent. Viewers currently like their cinematic fantasy fairly realistic, the better to suspend disbelief. But in reality, only crazy people break into song in the course of regular conversation. Conversely, the weirder the movie musical is, the better it appears to work (see Moulin Rouge! or Chicago). This would seem to play to Burton's and Depp's strengths.
With Burton at the helm, for example, we know the film will be visually front-loaded. His London is very murky and dark, its citizens very pale and sickly, the better perhaps to complement all the blood they're about to be sloshing around in--or to remind us of old black-and-white horror films. We also know there will be an abundance of quirk. What's not certain is whether the film can find an audience. Will the buckets of gore and the presence of the erstwhile Captain Jack Sparrow--not to mention an appearance by Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen--draw in the young gotta-get-to-it first-weekend viewers? Will the musical credentials and actorly cast lure the older theater crowd? Or will the two elements cancel each other out: too much violence for the fogies, too much singing and dancing for the kids?
Whether the movie turns out to be a bloodbath or a triumphal song, one thing's for sure: it will be cutting edge.
REVIEW
Atonement
Starring James McAvoy, Keira Knightley,Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai ,Vanessa Redgrave. Directed by Joe Wright. Opens Dec. 7
It's not the heat of this summer day in 1935 that brings emotions to a boil; it's the erotic humidity. Two sisters in an upper-class English family are about to have their lives changed: lovely Cecilia (Knightley), by surrendering to a long-simmering attraction to the housekeeper's son (McAvoy); and 13-year-old Briony (Ronan), by catching them in the act of first love. Briony is intellectually precocious, sexually naive. The inferences she makes from what she's seen--and the vengeful uses she puts them to--open wounds that will take decades to heal.
Atonement, from Ian McEwan's novel, traces the impact of Briony's adolescent decision through World War II (when the girl, then 18, is played by Garai) and up to the present (with Redgrave as Briony, who is finally ready to make her confession). Each period in the film packs a seismic revelation; the ultimate one is both devastating and cleansing.
The Brits are past masters at viewing passion with precision. Atonement has echoes of 1971's The Go-Between (a youngster's confusion about a grownup love affair) and 2004's Closer (in which revenge is a stronger impulse than desire). All these films say we are creatures of our wills; it's what makes us human. Atonement says we can sink into sin and lift ourselves out. That's the message of this wise, beautifully acted parable of vengeance and contrition.
REVIEW
The Kite Runner
Starring Khalid Abdalla, Zekiria Ebrahimi, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada. Directed by Marc Forster. Opens Dec. 14
One of those rare literary works that became an addiction for millions of readers, Khaled Hosseini's novel has been filmed most reverently. The movie is the book, with its narrative force and fondness for plot cliches. Amir (Ebrahimi, far right), a child of privilege in Afghanistan, loves to fly kites with his best friend, Hassan (Mahmoodzada), the son of his father's servant. One day Hassan is raped by a bully and his gang, and Amir, who sees the assault, does nothing to stop it. Indeed, he becomes vindictive toward Hassan, leading to many betrayals and reversals that will be resolved only when the older Amir (Abdalla), now living in the U.S., returns to a homeland ravaged by the Taliban.
The film has an authentic feel, thanks to its use of Afghan children in the lead roles and dialogue in the native tongue. But at heart it's a Victorian novel transposed to war-torn Afghanistan: Dickens spoken in Dari. Every atrocity endured in childhood will face an equal and opposing vengeance at the end; virtually every major character will reappear later; family relationships are not what they seem. Readers (and viewers) don't love books (and movies) like The Kite Runner in spite of these cliches but because of them. The fierce tidying up of ancient grievances allows us to believe that there may be justice in the world--at least in fiction.
Forster (Monster's Ball, Stranger Than Fiction) has ingested this elixir deeply. He's not out to make a spare, understated art film; he knows that the novel owes more to Hollywood than to Iranian cinema. So he pushes each scene, each character to extremes. Viewers will either be swept away ennobled or feel manipulated, even as they wipe away tears. The emotions may be forced, but that doesn't mean the movie won't get to you.
That's because the kids are terrific, persuasively playing out their devotions and resentments. It happens that the producers are trying to help one of the children, who feared harm from Afghans for having appeared in the rape scene. We can only hope that this boy's story has a happy Hollywood ending.
REVIEW
Youth Without Youth
Starring Tim Roth, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Opens Dec. 14
How many times can lightning strike? That's the theme of this film from a novella by Mircea Eliade. Dominic (Roth), an old professor, is ready to commit suicide when a lightning bolt nearly kills him, then miraculously restores him to vital middle age. He becomes involved with a woman (Lara) who reminds him of a lost love of his youth, and who seems to be channeling an ancient spirit. His gift of staying young holds a concomitant curse for her: she is aging before his eyes.
The first film Coppola has directed in a decade is not quite a triumph--its emotions fall flat at the end, when they ought to soar--but it is boldly romantic and seductively cinematic. The great American director of the '70s has survived with his operatic intensity intact. In Lara (Hitler's secretary in 2004's Downfall), he has an actress who can make emotions radiantly visible. Coppola, a starmaker from way back, still has an eye for charisma. In her performance, lightning strikes again.
REVIEW
There Will Be Blood
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Dillon Freasier, Paul Dano. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Opens Dec. 26
Ambition can drive a man to greatness or drive him to destruction, or do both. That was the theme of many novels of the early 20th century. One, Upton Sinclair's Oil, is the inspiration for this inward, wayward epic that spans 30 years of a tycoon's career. Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis, parading surface charm over a black heart) builds an oil empire on his tenacity, his ruthlessness and his seeming saving grace: a devotion to his son (Freasier), whom he totes from job to job.
Anderson's previous movies (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch Drunk Love) all teemed with vigorous eccentrics muscling themselves onto the screen. This film is stern, unaccommodating and, finally, daft. It's of a mind with its antihero, who says, "I don't care to explain myself." By the end, when Daniel faces off with a longtime preacher rival (Dano), the movie has retreated into its own deranged zone, to which even sympathetic viewers are forbidden.
PREVIEW
The Golden Compass
Starring Daniel Craig, Nicole Kidman, Dakota Blue Richards. Directed by Chris Weitz. Opens Dec. 7
And it came to pass that The Lord of the Rings begat sequels. And the sequels begat The Chronicles of Narnia. And behold, they were very profitable, being released in the Yuletide season, when families look for movies that all may enjoy. And lo, comes now The Golden Compass, based on another quasi-religious fantasy novel by a Brit and set in a parallel world in which kids must smite down malevolent forces. In this case, that's Kidman, playing one of this year's many very pale villains (see also Depp in Sweeney Todd, Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton, Ralph Fiennes' Voldemort and the Legend mutants). The film's appeal will rest as much on how well the fantasy elements are handled as on how the story's more controversial anti-church elements have been transliterated for family audiences. So far, the omens look good.
PREVIEW
I Am Legend
Starring Will Smith. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Opens Dec. 14
The moratorium on using New York City as the site of huge disasters is officially over. In this iteration, Manhattan becomes ground zero for a nasty plague. Gotham is sealed off from the rest of the world and inhabited solely, it seems, by former humans who go crazy when exposed to light--and by Will Smith. Oh, and his dog. The half hour of the movie that was screened for TIME was a nifty--and terrifying--mix of Cast Away and 28 Days Later. Smith has to forage for food (he goes deer-hunting in Times Square and pantry-diving in Tribeca), conduct experiments on rats to try to reverse the effects of the plague and, of course, fend off the ill-tempered creatures of the night. But what fun is there in all that if you have to do it alone? So he sends out a radio message every day asking for other survivors to meet him at South Street Seaport. (Clearly, he's hoping for tourists.) This is not the first movie to be made of the '50s science-fiction novel by Richard Matheson, but since filmgoers' appetite for both Mr. Smith and horror are at fever pitch, it may be the most eagerly anticipated.
PREVIEW
Charlie Wilson's War
Starring Tom Hanks, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julia Roberts. Directed by Mike Nichols. Opens Dec. 25
Secretly, somewhere, do you miss The West Wing? All those good-looking people talking policy and politics, making Washington look so sexy and important? Well, add bigger-name stars, a global platform and a sex- and alcohol-steeped '80s milieu and you've got Charlie Wilson's War. Aaron Sorkin, who wrote West Wing and this, is like Michael Moore's alter ego. Moore makes fun of government; Sorkin makes government look fun. For the movie, he drew on the book of the same name, by journalist George Crile, about Congressman Wilson, a large-living Texan (Hanks), who orchestrated the covert funding of the mujahedin in Afghanistan, thus striking a blow against the Soviets--and arming a bunch of religious extremists. Hanks gets an assist from two able co-conspirators: Roberts, who plays a rich religious society dame from Houston, and Hoffman (above, with Hanks), a maniacal renegade CIA agent. Whether the appeal of Hanks and Roberts plus the direction of Nichols can bring out an audience that has so far not embraced movies about war is unclear, but the cast and subject matter suggest Charlie is gunning for an Oscar.
REVIEW
The Orphanage
Starring Belen Rueda. Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona. Opens Dec. 28
Not many people hear that a house is haunted and want to move in. But Laura (Rueda) does. She was happy growing up in an orphanage; now she lives there with her husband and adopted son, eager to commune with the troubled spirits of her childhood friends. Like last year's Pan's Labyrinth, this superior Spanish thriller artfully mingles the real and the fantastic. To see it is to believe in the power of movies to evoke the darkest, most potent emotions and to get a case of those old-fashioned old-dark-house chills.
REVIEW
Juno
Starring Michael Cera, Jennifer Garner, Ellen Page. Directed by Jason Reitman. Opens Dec. 5
With all the anguish that accompanies most debates about teenage pregnancy, it's fun to meet a girl for whom being pregnant is a) kind of, like, a huge drag but also weirdly interesting and b) a chance to, you know, find some folks who want a baby and hand one over. That young woman is Juno MacGuff, a misfit teen with a plucky, distinctive view on life (she finds prospective adoptive parents in a supermarket circular) and an idiosyncratic vocabulary to go with it (she refers to her fetus as a "sea monkey"). The movie was written, in one of those only-in-Hollywood scenarios, by the equally idiosyncratic Diablo Cody after a talent manager stumbled across her blog and got her a deal. Garner and Jason Bateman play the potential parents, but it's Juno's dad (J.K. Simmons) and stepmom (Allison Janney) who steal the show. This is not the first movie this year in which people get pregnant and then find out how they feel about each other, but it could be the most humane.n