Reverse Shot

With their unflagging commitment to kinetic thrills, director Pierre Morel's three collaborations with Luc Besson earn the duo consideration as the action genre's current reigning champions. That does require that you forgive District B13, Taken, and the new one, From Paris with Love, their frequent jaw-dropping ludicrousness and consistent reliance on white male heroes forgivably murdering ethnic evildoers. Those willing to sync up with Morel/Besson will see that there is in fact nothing dumb about these movies in either conception or execution and that they’re driven by sharp wit and self-awareness.

Naturally, Red Riding is a lot to swallow in one sitting, and while the atmosphere's unremitting bleakness is potent and indeed would seem to be the very essence of this kind of genre filmmaking, as a single movie it seems a bit overdone, too hard-boiled, less gritty than murky. And whether it's a fault of Peace's source novels or (more likely) the result of its piecemeal production, the trilogy is rife with nonsensical twists, obvious loose ends, and blown opportunities.

Off and Running, the feature debut from documentary filmmaker Nicole Opper, jumps right into the existential crises of its heroine, Avery Klein-Cloud, dispensing with the introduction of background information before delving into conflict. Here, in the same breath that she tells us her name, Avery confesses with frank, articulate anxiety that she has decided to contact her birth mother for the first time.

Rarely outside of the seventies disaster movies of Irwin Allen has such a high caliber cast been assembled to play characters as insubstantial as these—and it shows in the performances. Wilkinson is miscast as a cockney mummy’s boy and doesn't convince; McShane offers what amounts to little more than a gay parody of his role in Sexy Beast; Hurt is entertaining as the toxic pensioner, but struggles throughout with a set of false dentures.

Darwin was nothing if not careful, and in his concluding chapters, after building on mounds of eminently sensible evidence, he suggests simply that perhaps God hadn’t created each species individually, but rather created an organized system with rules, actions, and reactions that could be open to scientific study. How Darwin’s beliefs evolved after Origin is another story, but his thinking during the period suggests something far different than the wracked torment of Amiel’s melodrama.

Larger questions than how successful the film is as art enter into the equation; assessment of the film’s aesthetic merits shouldn’t be avoided, but it’s clear by now that Avatar represents something important, something very big to the industry—in the sense of how films are made, distributed, exhibited, and received—but what that is remains unclear. It feels likely at this point that we’ll look back on the last major release of the aughts as a watershed moment and feel that big budget entertainments were different post-Avatar. But how?

Russian director Andrey Khrzhanovsky has made a very Russian film about a Soviet-born poet who was nevertheless a charismatic, anti-provincial man of the world. Khrzhanovsky’s slant is understandable, forgivable, and certainly not fatal, but does lead the Brodsky story into the service of a somewhat too-familiar nostalgia trip.

I never read Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, possibly because I didn’t spend enough time in airport bookstores in 2002. So I can’t say whether or not Peter Jackson’s film version fails out of excessive reverence to its source material, or because it’s not faithful enough. But I can say with total confidence that it is a failure, and a conspicuous one at that. Arriving near the end of an Oscar season already flush with egregious offenders, from the glibly pandering (Up in the Air) to the earnestly dull (Invictus), Jackson’s film stands out in its strident commitment to bad ideas.

Reverse Shot's annual year-end awards, including Most Needless Backlash, Most Successful Failure, Most Overrated, Worst Date Movie, Best 3-D, The Alfred Molina Award for Overacting, Worst Character Name, Best and Worst Soundtrack, Best Nic Cage, Actress Most in Need of a Sabbatical, and more!

Leo and Sofya Tolstoy were collaborators, lovers, and formidable adversaries, and theirs was a story so richly dramatic that Tolstoy pilfered liberally from it in War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and The Kreutzer Sonata, among other works. With The Last Station, writer-director Michael Hoffman, whose best film is the delightfully absurd satire Soapdish (other, lesser credits include A Midsummer Night's Dream, One Fine Day, and Restoration), takes this legendarily tempestuous relationship and turns it into middling awards bait.

Why do we put ourselves through it? Why relive those moments and movies that made us question our very livelihood? As usual, the most puerile, rancid films largely were not tepid genre flicks or bloat-budgeted blockbusters but prestige pictures with inflated senses of their own (nonexistent) importance and cynical, audience-baiting hits that commentators and mindless critics like to claim really "tapped into the zeitgeist."

Summer Hours foregrounds the “domestic” in domestic drama: the family estate as home, museum, sanctuary, birthright, locus of secrets, and repository of tradition. That tradition doesn’t end with the death of the estate’s matriarch but with the growing geographical and psychological distance of two of her three children, and Assayas views this rift not with sentimental nostalgia but with a mature awareness of passing time and vanished inheritance.

Here's the good news: Michael K. Williams, who played Omar on The Wire, is in Wonderful World, the debut film by writer-director Joshua Goldin. The bad news? He spends most of the movie in a diabetic coma. So we’re pretty much stuck with Matthew Broderick's Ben, a former children's musician turned sullen, whiny, grumpy, and dumpy copy editor.

Despite modern accoutrements like cell phones and industrial shearing machines, the film engages with the imagery of the traditional western, including silhouetted shots of a cowboy riding low in his saddle against a ridge at sunset, or leaning up against a tree with his hat over his face to take a nap. The men here appear as tough, stoic, and profoundly lonely we would expect from a Hollywood movie. As one of the herders asks in a so-perfect-it-could-be-scripted moment, “How can dogs like me if people don’t?”

Even indefatigable auteurists, for whom pattern itself—rather than the meaning of the revisited gesture or theme—is sacrosanct, can play favorites. At this point in his career, especially after his disastrous stunt remake of his own Funny Games, Haneke has as many detractors as he has supporters, and The White Ribbon will repel or reward them accordingly. And as it happens, each response will be justified.

The aughts haven’t been particularly kind to Terry Gilliam. In the Nineties, when he proved his critical, commercial, and cult mettle with The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he rebounded from the editorial and legal disputes that blunted the distribution and reception of his major post–Monty Python Eighties efforts. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a Terry Gilliam film through and through, but those of us who grew up wearing our allegiance to his earlier work proudly won’t be pleased to note that Gilliam-esque now seems little more than a fraying bag of tired tricks.