Film

The further I get away from my high school years, the more those days seem like a rose-tinted ball of nostalgia, even though at the time I was pretty miserable. I was a senior when the Columbine shootings happened and, until graduation, that event seemed to bring everyone in school closer. As school shootings have become either less frequent or less publicized, films set in high school have once again become focused on the us-vs.-them mentality.
Characters are drawn as black and white, leaving no room for shades of grey. Chronicle addresses this by having three complex main characters that don't fit into any of the boxes in which Hollywood normally places teenage characters. They are heroic, selfish, hopeless, moral and morally bankrupt. In other words, they're human, which makes them fascinating to watch. Oh, and they have superpowers.

Before getting to what Safe House is, I'll say what it is thankfully not, and that is another of those disappointing Tony Scott/Denzel Washington collaborations. It's more like an espionage version of Training Day, with a much cooler, calmer Denzel. Instead of director Antoine Fuqua, it's a Swedish director with an equally exotic name, Daniel Espinosa, known for Snabba Cash (Easy Money). Instead of the hard-driving streets of L.A., we have the intense avenues of Cape Town, South Africa.
CIA agent Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a low-level CIA “housekeeper” in charge of a safe house where suspects are taken by CIA operatives to be interrogated. Enter Tobin Frost (Washington), the agency’s most notorious traitor, who mysteriously turns himself in. When the safe house is attacked, gunmen pursue Weston and Frost. Taking a page from the identity-and-loyalty-in-question Bourne movies and Salt, this flick has two action heroes and more gratuitous violence than you can shake a semi-automatic weapon at.

The previews for Woman in Black are of the green-tinted night camera variety, showing “candid” audiences' reactions of fright. This is the same technique employed by the Paranormal Activity franchise to sell tickets. To me it's the film equivalent of restaurants showing faded pictures of their food in the window – never a good sign. It's a shame the marketing research team resorted to this kind of advertising because in actuality this is an old school Victorian gothic ghost story that qualifies as decent horror.
This atmospheric retro-chiller, set in an isolated Yorkshire village, is a production of England’s revived Hammer label and features a post-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe in his first grown up role. The foundation for the story is screenwriter Jane Goldman's adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel, which also gave birth to a radio series, TV movie and long-running West End stage play. While the highly unoriginal title needs some sprucing up, in the context of this movie it suffices.

Christopher Hampton’s stage play The Talking Cure provides the cerebral basis for David Cronenberg to dive into the largely overlooked story of Sabina Spielrein and her influence on the fathers of modern psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Sabina (played with astonishing authority by Keira Knightley) is a Russian Jewish mental patient brought to Jung’s Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich in 1904. Sabina's “hysteria” impedes her speech as she contorts her face, neck, and head in violent spasms. Outwardly, she seems obviously quite insane. Michael Fassbender’s Jung is able to calmly look beyond Sabina’s off-putting physical demeanor in the interest of curing her. Jung is determined to use Sabina as a premier test patient for Freud’s revolutionary and conversational therapy, which he mistakenly calls “psychanalysis.”
Cronenberg's film glides effortlessly across years as Jung meets Freud (Viggo Mortensen) to discuss psychoanalysis and enjoin in a friendship fraught with lurking tension. The filmmaker masterfully controls the soundscape to underpin shifts of physical, emotional, and intellectual import. Howard Shore’s delicate music is never allowed to intrude on a scene. Ugliness becomes beautiful; beauty becomes divine.

Liam Neeson, the actor best known for playing thoughtful, sometimes heroic men, has somehow managed (in his late 50s, no less) to reinvent himself as a steely-eyed action star in the vein of Clint Eastwood or the late Charles Bronson. Watching him beat the living hell out of absolutely everyone in his path in movies like Taken and Unknown proved more fun than anyone imagined. Because of that, the marketing campaign for The Grey has almost exclusively been focusing on the novelty of Liam Neeson fist-fighting giant grey wolves. However, if the film trailer's shot of him taping broken glass to his hands and charging a wolf is the only thing that has you excited about this movie, then you will likely walk out of the theater disappointed. Director Joe Carnahan had more on his mind than wolf punching.

I have a few problems with this movie. First off, when you call something haywire, the audience really shouldn't wait the entire movie to find out that nobody goes haywire. I mean if a director called a movie “Boycott” or “Slaughter,” we would expect to see one of those things happen onscreen. That's not the case with Haywire, director Steven Soderbergh's latest foray into action/espionage.
I'm a fan of Soderbergh. I liked Ocean's 11(12 and 13) and I like that he has the guts to make a major epic like Che, as well as low-budget art movies such as The Girlfriend Experience, Bubble and the overlooked Kafka. He always seems to challenge genre stereotypes and puts his intellectual stamp on his subjects, but not here. Sure, there's a snazzy jazz soundtrack and exotic locales, but no real shocks. Haywire is a mediocre flick that feels contrived and cliché. The best thing about the movie is the camera work, which stuns.

Michel Hazanavicius' effervescent The Artist seems to be staking out a curious territory during the 2011-12 film awards season. On the one hand, it feels like it was genetically engineered to grab movie critics' attention more than that of general audiences: It's in black and white, it's silent, it swoons over cinema history and its creative team is made up of people whose names are hard to pronounce. Yet its multiple critics'-group wins have occasionally felt like the recognition of an acceptable compromise between the esoteric artsyness of something like The Tree of Life and serious-minded popular hits like The Help. What's not to like about The Artist? And then again, what is there, exactly, to love about it?

Whether you have children of your own, plan to someday have kids or simply can't stand them, it's universally known that at some point a child will make your life a pain in the ass. Acclaimed director Roman Polanski brings us one such moment without even introducing the rascals.
After a disagreement between two boys turns violent, the parents of the children converge over the details and the proper way to handle it, only to find themselves acting like children when their differing opinions get out in the open. This oddly entertaining comedy, featuring humor that goes from dry to downright scorched, takes place entirely inside a New York apartment.

It's common knowledge that our modern movie-going experience has been inundated with remakes from every genre under the sun, so I was leery that Contraband, starring Mark Wahlberg, is the updated version of Lucio Fulci's Italian gangster splatter-fest of the same name. Well, there might be some miniscule similarities, but the Italian maestro's film is left unscathed. As it turns out, this film is actually director Baltasar Kormákur’s remake of his own 2008 film, Reykjavik-Rotterdam.

“Cerebral.” That's the first word that comes to mind in describing Tinker Tailor Solider Spy. And that was the last word echoing in my brain as I left the theater. The problem with cerebral art on film as opposed to in print is that it's harder to convey the feeling of something going on in someone's head when nothing is happening onscreen. A book can go into detail about what someone is feeling and/or thinking, but long takes of peoples’ expressions does not make mind readers out of an audience. With little dialogue, this is a movie that benefits those who have read the book.
Based on John LeCarré's classic 1974 novel, the film version leaves something to be desired. The actors are all superlative, especially Gary Oldman (getting his due by finally carrying a movie with this much weight), but when very little transpires onscreen, it's very hard to decipher what the hell is motivating any of these spies. I know they're supposed to be secretive, but this is overkill. With a very simple plot that's not built out of your basic twisty-turny super espionage, it's all about the inner workings of spies' brains. Luckily, I was fortunate to see most of the BBC miniseries staring Alec Guinness that delved a little deeper over time to tell the story in a relaxed, coherent manner and gave me a chance to soak in all the characters a little better. The 2011 version crams a lot of mental chess and secretive inner turmoil into the space of two hours, and the result is like watching paint dry.