“The Way” is a way better movie than you would imagine from a director who was once a Brat Packer whose most famous character admitted to taping “Larry Lester's buns together” in “The Breakfast Club.” It’s also a family affair with Emilio Estevez directing his father Martin Sheen in the lead role.

Sheen plays Tom, a complacent optometrist whose adult son (Estevez) is killed in a freak accident while walking El camino de Santiago from France to Spain. After collecting his son’s ashes in France Tom decides to continue his son’s journey and walk the 800 plus km pilgrimage.

What begins as a physical trek turns into a spiritual journey as he spreads his son’s ashes and forms a small family of fellow travelers (Yorick van Wageningen, Deborah Kara Unger and James Nesbitt) before reaching his goal of seeing the burial site of the remains of the apostle

Saint James at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain.

“The Way” is a road movie. Not the Bob and Bing kind of thing where people burst into song and Dorothy Lamour does the samba, but a movie that really is about the journey and the lessons learned along the way.

Estevez has made a thoughtful film with beautiful scenery, complex characters and just a few too many walking montages. The characters walk and walk, which is fine because mostly they are going somewhere both physically and mentally, but fewer steps might have made for a tighter film.

Estevez allows the story to breath, but sometimes, like the hikers themselves, the story breathes a little too heavily. There aren’t many lighthearted moments here and Sheen brings dignity and gravitas to his role, but clearly several moments meant to tug at the hearty strings fall flat.

“The Way” is a heartfelt and interesting film, that occasionally over reaches but succeeds in telling a life affirming story.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: 4 STARS

No, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” isn’t about four alliteratively named sisters, it’s a psychological thriller about a young woman suffering from delusions and paranoia after escaping from an abusive cult in the Catskill Mountains and returning to her family and normal life. Her real name is Martha, Marcy May is her cult name and Marlene is a cult code name.

This chilling drama is a showcase for the talents of its star Elizabeth Olsen. She has older, more famous twin sisters, but the kid stuff that made her sibling’s billionaires has been left behind. Instead she plays a damaged woman in a serious film. Her spiritual journey has come to an end and now she must begin a dangerous physical journey to get away from her captors.

“Martha Marcy May Marlene” feels like a horror film without any of the hallmarks of the genre. It has atmosphere and paranoia to burn, but it is the haunted look on Olsen’s face that sells the movie and marks her arrival as a serious actress.

Tags: 3 ½ STARS, Drama

No, “Martha Marcy May Marlene” isn’t about four alliteratively named sisters, it’s a psychological thriller about a young woman suffering from delusions and paranoia after escaping from an abusive cult in the Catskill Mountains and returning to her family and normal life. Her real name is Martha, Marcy May is her cult name and Marlene is a cult code name.

This chilling drama is a showcase for the talents of its star Elizabeth Olsen. She has older, more famous twin sisters, but the kid stuff that made her sibling’s billionaires has been left behind. Instead she plays a damaged woman in a serious film. Her spiritual journey has come to an end and now she must begin a dangerous physical journey to get away from her captors.

“Martha Marcy May Marlene” feels like a horror film without any of the hallmarks of the genre. It has atmosphere and paranoia to burn, but it is the haunted look on Olsen’s face that sells the movie and marks her arrival as a serious actress.

Tags: 4 Stars, Drama

Hunter S. Thompson wrote “The Rum Diary” in 1961 before he became the revered gonzo journalist who penned “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” It’s very loosely based on a period of time he spent in San Juan, Puerto Rico in the early days of his writing career, before, as his alter ego Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) says in the film, he knew “who to write like me.”

So don’t expect the surreal poetry of “Fear and Loathing” or the disjointed charm of “Where the Buffalo Roam.” This is an origin story, the roots of gonzo, but the gonzo spirit of its creator is sadly missing.

Depp plays Kemp using a slight variation on the clipped Thompson accent he made famous in “Fear and Loathing.” He’s a hard drinking, failed novelist who thought he’d try his hand at selling some “words for money” to a newspaper in Puerto Rico. His plan to “lift the stone on the American Dream,” however, is kiboshed by an editor (Richard Jenkins) more interested maintaining the status quo than exposing the country’s ills. Assigned to writing an astrology column Kemp peers into the bottoms of lots of glasses of rum and becomes obsessed with Chenault (Amber Heard), the girlfriend of a shady PR man (Aaron Eckhart).

Kemp is a struggling writer, an artist still struggling to find his voice, which echoes the main failing of the film. Despite a director, Bruce Robinson, who made one of the funniest and best films about boozing (“Withnail and I”) and Depp’s close friendship with Thompson, the movie feels as if it is searching for a purpose. A voice. Despite the presence of a Hermaphrodite Oracle of the Dead, countless ounces of rum, one drug trip and some major movie star mojo from Depp, the movie falls flat.

It’s a story about perception—Eckhart’s PR man is selling one vision of the island, Kemp wants to reveal another—and how gazing into that chasm helped Kemp discover his voice and integrity but in the end it is neither the savage indictment of lazy journalism it should be, or (because of an ambiguous non-ending) the celebration of the power of the written word it couldn’t have been.

As the main curator of Thompson’s cinematic legacy Depp breathes some life into Kemp, although by times the broad performance feels at odds with the tone of the rest o the story.

As for the rest of the cast, Michael Rispoli embodies the boozy spirit of the piece. Giovanni Ribisi goes one swig over the line and will someone please give Amber Heard a job on “Mad Men?” Her face screams 1965.

Of course the film’s main character’s name is Paul Kemp and it takes place before the finely crafted persona of Hunter S. Thompson came into being but a healthier dose of the writer’s “ink and rage” might have given “The Run Diary” the spark it needed to really ignite.

Tags: 2 ½ STARS, Drama

Imagine a cross between “Fight Club,” “Snatch” and the Hatfields and McCoys and you get the idea of what “Knuckle,” a new documentary about Irish bare knuckle brawlers, is all about.

Twelve years in the making it’s a document of a decades old feud between two families, he Quinn McDonaghs and the Joyce clan. They’ve been fighting for so long that neither side remembers what exactly started the fight, and neither do they care. They taunt one another in person or via video and brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles… everyone gets in on the action.

It’s a fascinating look into the secretive world of the Irish Travellers, a nomadic people who maintain a separate language and set of traditions. Director Ian Palmer has to be congratulated for sticking this out for the twelve years it took to shape the movie but should have cut back on the moralizing. At one point during his narration he talks about stopping the film for moral reasons… and yet he doesn’t stop. Perhaps someone reminded him the movie was about the Travellers and not him.

Tags: Drama, 3 ½ STARS

The premise of “Caché,” a psychological thriller from German director Michael Haneke is unsettling. It explores how completely a couple’s lives can unravel when they are terrorized by an unknown voyeur who videotapes their comings-and- goings, revealing secrets about their lives.

Starring Oscar winner Juliet Binoche, it is not an easy film. No answers are offered and it emits an overwhelming aura of paranoia, but it does offer up interesting comments on the power of denial and guilt.

Great acting, unsettling subject matter and provocative filmmaking make Cache essential viewing.

Tags: 4 ½ STARS, Drama

Light on story but big on attitude, Loveless is a midlife crisis romantic comedy that could have used a rewrite, but packs in enough enjoyment to be worth a download.

Tags: Drama

Coming from director Roland Emmerich, you might expect “Anonymous” to be a large scale action movie about the end of the world, a prehistoric beast or giant Japanese monster. Instead the German director has left the disaster motifs of his previous work behind and created a large scale period piece about the importance of literature set against a backdrop of intrigue and sexual peccadilloes in seventeenth century England.

With a plot that mixes and matches themes from history and Shakespeare’s plays, “Anonymous” uses the backdrop of the struggle for succession between the Tudors and the Cecils as the Essex rebellion moves against Queen Elizabeth I (Vanessa Redgrave) to set the scene for the debut of Shakespeare’s plays. But were they actually written by Shakespeare? The movie supposes it was Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans)—the Anonymous of the title—who penned plays attributed to William Shakespeare. He kept to the shadows to save his family the embarassment of havimg a common writer in their midst and because thee plays were openly critical of the Queen's advisors Cecil and Raleigh.

In a story ripe with mystery the only real question is how this got made at all. Big budget Shakespearean movies don’t get made much anymore, so I guess the next best thing is to make a big budget movie about Shakespeare, and Emmerich, despite his tendency to try and juggle too many story threads at one time does a good job at bringing the elegantly filthy world of Elizabethan Britain. Powdered faces, filthy fingernails and velvet jackets abound and the atmosphere adds much to the story.

This is a sprawling story with many twists and turns. The downside is the film's sketchy casting. In flashbacks the queen and Edward appear to be the same age, but later after a major twist, are revealed to be sixteen years apart. This kind of lack of attention to detail muddies the waters in the flashbacks, making it difficult to follow the story in the first hour. Soon enough, however, all the players are straightened away and the pleasures of the story take hold.

A liberal mix of fact and fiction--there is no real life evidence that the Earl of Oxford penned the plays--"Anonymous" is a twisted tale about how politics and art intersect, and the written word's ability to instigate change.

Tags: 4 Stars, Drama

The key piece of dialogue in “Drive,” a new thriller starring Ryan Gostling, happens early on before any of the hard core action begins. Bernie Rose, a shady character played by Albert Brooks extends his hand to Gostling. The younger actor stares at the gesture of friendship for a moment before declining to shake. “My hands are a little dirty,” he says. “So are mine,” replies Rose.

That quick conversation tells us that nobody in this movie is above boards and they don’t care who knows it.

Gostling is a man with no name, simply known as Driver, a movie stunt driver/grease monkey by day and get-a-way wheelman by night. Befriending his neighbors Irene (Carey Mulligan) and young son Benicio (Kaden Leos, who dials the cute kid factor way up) he makes a deal to drive get-a-way for some criminals to square a debt Irene’s husband ran up and safeguard the mother and child. When the deal goes bad he unwittingly becomes involved in a treacherous situation involving Irene’s recently paroled husband, one million dollars in cash and some angry mobsters.

“Drive” is an art house thriller. It’s stylized, with lighting effects, lots of slow motion and interesting camera angles that create a sense of unease that permeates every scene. For every instance of brutal violence director Nicolas Winding Refn (“Valhalla Rising,” “Bronson”) also escalates the movie’s sense of heightened reality. Very long pauses punctuate most every exchange of dialogue and how is it that no one seems to notice that the Driver is drenched in blood as he walks through a tony Chinese restaurant? “Drive” exists in its own world, and it is a fascinating place.

Here Gostling isn’t the easy charmer of “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” he plays Driver like a coiled spring. There hasn’t been a leading man this close-mouthed since Rudolph Valentino was the king of the silent screen. He’s a man of very few words, but his silence hints at an active inner life and his actions certainly speak to having a past. It’s a brave and strange performance, either emotionally shut down, or simply cool-as-a-cucumber, take your pick.

As for his co-stars, Mulligan isn’t given much to do except use her subtly expressive face to make physical whatever is going on in her head, but Albert Brooks, cast against type as a mobster and Bryan Cranston as an unlucky garage owner are stellar. Refn clearly loves his actors, stroking them in long close-ups, allowing the camera to luxuriate on their faces. It’s the exact opposite of what we usually find in thrillers, but here it adds atmosphere and star power.

“Drive” is long-on silence and big on anti-heroes, and is one of the most intriguing movies of the year so far.

Tags: 4 ½ STARS, Drama

Director Brian De Palma is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s biggest fans, and in “Obsession,” his, well, obsession with the master of suspense’s film—“Vertigo” in particular—reaches its apex.

The movie focuses on New Orleans businessman Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson). Years after his wife and daughter are killed in a botched kidnapping, he meets and falls in love with a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife.

“Obsession” doesn’t quite measure up to the sublime “Vertigo,” but it does offer up some good thrills if you can get past the implausibility of the film’s finale. The plot points might not add up, but De Palma masterfully manipulates the movie’s atmosphere, creating a sense of drama and dread that is really effective.

Tags: 3 Stars, Drama

Instead of running the title card “based on a true story” up front, “The Whistleblower,” a new drama starring Rachel Weisz, Monica Bellucci and Vanessa Redgrave, begins with the disclaimer “inspired by true events. Some of the characters may be composites or fictitious.” No “just the facts ma'am” for this movie. The filmmakers decided to take a perfectly serviceable and important story and tart it up with Hollywood story elements. Because facts are often stranger than fiction, it’s a shame they didn’t stick more with the truth and less with the movie contrivances.

Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac a Nebraska policewoman based on a real life person of the same name. Divorced, she’s desperate to move across country to be closer to her kids but can’t lay her hands on either the job transfer or the money to make the trip. To raise the cash she takes a six month job as a peace keeper in Sarajevo, Bosnia. War has ended and a company called Democra Security has been contracted by the U.N. to help smooth the transition from strife to peace. Soon, however, she uncovers a human trafficking ring specializing in young women sold into prostitution. Uncovering a far reaching conspiracy she finds herself making some powerful enemies.

“The Whistleblower” is a well intentioned film that more often than not plays like an episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” albeit with more exotic locations. It’s a police procedural with many of the tried and true plot devices of the genre. Evidence seems to show up when needed, progress is inevitably slowed by bureaucratic process and the main character is true blue. “I’m an American police officer,” she says to a young woman afraid that the U.N. isn’t going to be able to help, “it doesn’t matter who I work for.” No that’s plucky.

Where it differs from other procedurals is in its uncompromising imagery. A dank dungeon brothel is identified by close-ups of chains, dirty mattresses and used condoms and a scene involving the bad guys disciplining one of their captives is too grim to be described here. Those scenes have impact and underline the importance of telling this story from a humanist standpoint, but from a cinematic perspective it all feels kind of standard and often borders on the sanctimonious.

Weisz, in the role that Mariska Hargitay would have played if this was a TV movie, brings some depth to the gritty cop stereotype we’ve seen a hundred times before, conveying urgency and determination.
“The Whistleblower” is topped by an effective and exciting final reel but for my money it takes just a bit too long to get there.

Tags: 2 ½ STARS, Drama

“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” is likely the film that brought to life the image of the poor tormented former child star, living their years out of the spotlight as troubled, demented messes.

Bette Davis plays Baby Jane, a vaudeville star whose best days are far behind her. In her day she had a line of dolls named after her, now she lives in a rambling old house with her sister Blanche (Crawford). Time has not been kind to either of them. Forgotten, Baby Jane lives in a fantasy world, Blanche is trapped in a wheelchair, the result of a brutal car accident that cut her successful acting career short.

Living in isolation they are prisoners in their Hollywood mansion, afraid of the outside world and one another.

A slow burn, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” takes a while to get going, but once this tale of sibling rivalry (touched by the ravages of former fame) begins to escalate it’s a great deal of fun.

Davis hungrily chews the scenery—the film’s most famous line, “But you are, Blanche! You are in that chair! is delivered with untamed gusto—in a performance that contrasts nicely with Crawford’s understated work.

Creepy, campy and chilling, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” is this week’s essential film.

Tags: 4 Stars, Drama

In “The Ides of March,” George Clooney (who also directs) plays a Democratic Party candidate. He’s the kind of guy who would make the top of Bill O’Reilly’s head pop off. He’s pro-ecology, anti-oil. He wants to tax the rich and legalize gay marriage. If he leans any further left he'll topple over. Although Clooney has spoken out about many of these topics in real life, hasn't made a left wing fm. Instead he's made a warts and all political movie.

The movie focuses its story on Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), an idealistic campaign manager who will do anything to win, as long as he truly believes in the candidate. He is devoted to Governor Mike Morris (Clooney), a candidate in the Democratic primary. The first hour is spent getting into the campaign, learning the machinations of a big league primary run, the behind the scenes. Clooney sets up the themes of the piece--loyalty, ethics and the hard edge that comes from playing in the bigs--before taking a right turn--story wise, not ideologically--into different territory.

I'm not going to give away the twist, but it is really then that the movie picks up steam. The first hour is good stuff, great acting from Paul Giamatti, and P.S.H. and a fascinating, if occasionally dry look at life in the political fast lane. Then comes the blackmail, the meetings in darkened stairwells and double crossing journalists.

Gosling impresses as he makes his way from idealism to stark realism, and Clooney looks like he was born to sit in an oval office, but it is the supporting cast who really shine.
Giamatti and Hoffman reek of the backroom. They play opponents but are cut from the same cloth, men who are two steps ahead of everybody else in the room.
“The Ides of March” takes a bit too long to get to the game changing moment, but when the acting is this good, it’s worth the wait.

Tags: 3½ Stars, Drama

I'm not going to suggest “What's Your Number?” is a great, or even good movie. It has a typical rom com plot gussied up with some Judd Apatow style barbs and some gratuitous shots of its almost naked stars, but it also has Anna Faris, and for me that's enough. She has crack comic timing and an unpredictable way with a line that takes a Kathryn Heigl level script and turns it into something watchable.

Faris is Ally, a young Bostonian with a bad relationship track record. Weeks before her sister is due to tie the knot she reads a magazine article which suggests the number of sexual partners a woman has had will determine her romantic success later in life. More than twenty, it says, and you have virtually no hope of ever settling down. She does the math and realizes she’s in the danger zone. To prevent going over twenty partners she revisits all her ex-boyfriends in hopes of finding a husband.

“What’s Your Number?” is a strange movie that mixes and mingles both the standard old cell phone switcheroo plot device AND edgy rape jokes. It doesn't have the laughs of an Apatow movie or the heart... but once again, I'll say it, it has Anna Faris.

Faris is working hard here, playing against a script that casts her as the most clichéd of all rom com characters, a desperate woman on the hunt for a man. She’s a harlot with a past but her male next door neighbor (Chris Evans), who has hundreds of notches on his bedpost, is a charmer who simply hasn’t found the right woman yet. Just another example of how wrong headed the sexual politics of rom coms are, even in 2011.

A love scene with a puppet and Andy Samberg is a highlight and one of the things—did I mention Anna Faris?—that make this movie almost special. There are just enough funny scenes (and shots of co-star Evans's abs) to almost make this an in-the-pocket rom com, but then the good stuff is followed by long stretches of by-the-book writing. It's a shame to see this kind of potential wasted.

Tags: 3 Stars, Drama, Comedy

“Moneyball,” the new sports drama starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, begins with the Mickey Mantle quote, “It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about a game you’ve played all your life.” The legendary New York Yankees outfielder and first baseman played eighteen seasons in the big leagues but likely wouldn’t recognize the game as played in this behind-the-scenes drama.

Based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis, Pitt plays Billy Beane, the real life General Manager of the Oakland A’s. Faced with having to piece together a pro team with a budget a fourth as large as the New York Yankees he breaks with one hundred years of baseball tradition—using scouts, instinct and guts—to find a scientific method to build a team on the cheap. With a Yale trained economist (Jonah Hill) he creates sabermetrics, a mind boggling combination of facts, figures and computer algorithms to recruit his team.

It all sounds very dry, but so did "The Social Network" before you actually sat down and watched it. "Moneyball" takes what cold be a dry subject of baseball stats and spices it up with complex, interesting characters, a compelling human story while leaving the usual sport’s movie clichés behind.

It moves at about half the speed of "The Social Network" but that's OK we're not dealing with the fast moving world of cyber space here but the more relaxed pace of America's favorite pastime.

But this isn't a baseball movie. Pitt and Hill, in a rare serious role, dominate the movie with their behind the scenes stories. Like "The Social Network" "Moneyball" places the onus on the characters and not the technology that drives the story. We've seen baseball movies before, but we've never sent the game from this angle. It's a new take on the game, one that may leave Mantel scratching his head but should leave audiences rapt.

Tags: 4 Stars, Drama

This gender bending version of one of Shakespeare’s classics from director Julie Taymor sees Helen Mirren as Prospera, a woman accused of witchcraft and banished. Beautiful looking, this movie suffers from too many special effects and not enough heart.

Tags: 2 ½ STARS, Drama

This French movie features Donald Sutherland’s son Rossif as Jesus Christ and two women in love with a Dominican priest. God acting can’t save this dull but heartfelt film.

Tags: 1 ½ Stars, Drama

There is no shortage of John Lennon on celluloid. There are five official Beatles movies, documentaries like “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” a 2006 movie that focuses on Lennon’s transformation from musician into antiwar activist, and even experimental short films like the John and Yoko shorts like “Two Virgins” and “Apotheosis.” He’s been portrayed by everyone from Paul Rudd (in “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”) to Monty Python’s Eric Idle but rarely has any actor captured both Lennon’s rebelliousness and vulnerability as Aaron Johnson does in “Nowhere Boy.”

The coming-of-age-story of one of the most famous people of the twentieth century, “Nowhere Boy” examines Lennon’s relationship with his estranged mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff) and his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), the woman who raised him. For the first time on film we see the effect the combustible combination of women had on his life. His mother’s ready! steady! go! lifestyle helping to form his rock ‘n’ roll side, while Aunt Mimi’s more slow and steady influence brought out John’s sensitive, artistic side.

“Nowhere Boy” is a fascinating character study that reveals the formative years of a complicated man. Aaron Johnson, who was eighteen at the time, succeeds because he doesn’t try to imitate Lennon, instead he plays a young, confused man who is on the cusp of growing up. Sure, the distinctive Liverpool accent is there as are the right period details, but it’s what is beyond those crutches that make this performance, as they said in “Yellow Submarine,” “a tickle of joy on the belly the universe.”

First time director Sam Taylor-Wood gets the muddled mix of excitement, testosterone and disappointment Lennon felt on an almost daily basis just right, and in the process has made one of the best Beatle bios to date.

Tags: 4 Stars, Drama

Terrence Malick is probably the biggest name director whose movies you’ve never seen. His is the kind of name filmy types like to toss into conversations as a test to see how deep your knowledge of movies runs. Having made just five movies since 1973 he is less productive than a four toed sloth, but as a chef I know used to say, “do you want it fast, or do you want it good?”

His latest, “Tree of Life,” is a star studded look at life, death and the birth of the universe. He compresses the history of the world, mankind and the lives of a Waco, Texas family into two hours and twenty minutes. This coming of age story—or more rightly a coming of the ages story—is impressionistic storytelling, nonlinear, non-story based but not nonsensical.

It’s a deeply spiritual movie—from the Job quote that begins the story to the Amen chorus at the end—that asks the big questions—Why do awful things happen? Are we always in God’s hands?—often in reverential, whispered tones. Style wise Malick constantly tilts the camera upwards, keeping an eye on the heavens.

This is not light summer entertainment. In fact, some will think this is pretentious twaddle, while others will see a movie that replaces traditional storytelling with deep seated feelings.

I’m leaning ever so slightly toward the pretentious twaddle camp, certainly in the film’s first hour, where Malick inserts a long sequence detailing the abovementioned birth of the universe. Faces and lifelike shapes appear in the primordial goop that makes up much of this extended creation scene, and by the time the dinosaurs appear it is hard to remember this is a movie starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn.

What does it mean? Not sure. Narratively it adds little to the film and as artful as it may be it feels too new agey by half. But as pretentious twaddle goes, it’s really beautiful. If this movie was made in 1968 it would have been a “head” movie, delighting stoners at midnight screenings.

But it’s not 1968, so luckily the first forty minutes gives way to a slightly less impressionistic mid section, based mostly in the family home of Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain) and their three kids. It’s a feel, a hazy look at growing up.
Pitt impresses as the upwardly mobile, but thin skinned tyrant father; a man who thought he did everything right only to discover his instincts were off. There’s also a surprising character arc in a movie that is more about intuition than arcs. The family story is effective, its Malick’s struggle to place it within a much larger context and the constantly shifting points of view that obscure the film’s main point, a questioning of faith in the light of great personal tragedy.

Obscured though the point may be, this is one seriously beautiful film. Malick has his characters talk about living in a state of grace—love everyone, every leaf, every ray of light—and it’s not hard to imagine that is an echo of his filmmaking ethos. He finds splendor in the things we don’t see onscreen very often anymore, a pure shot of fireflies flittering in the darkness, landscapes and nature, unadulterated, left alone to speak for themselves.

Critics will use words like textural, nuanced to describe “Tree of Life.” I’ll add a few more. Heartfelt, willfully obscure and intriguing.

Tags: 4 Stars, Drama

The subtitle for “One Day,” a new romance starring Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway, should be “Carpe Diem!” Seize the day, it seems to be telling us, particularly if you’re in love.

Sturgess and Hathaway each affect English accents for their roles—his is real, her’s clearly isn’t—of people who meet on July 15, 1988 and play romantic cat and mouse for almost twenty years. In the beginning Hathaway is an earnest poet who thinks she can change the world. How earnest is she? She plays Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” as seduction music. That’s pretty earnest. He’s a rich kid with a yin yang symbol, representing the perfect union of opposites, tattooed on his ankle and, as it turns out on his heart. This pair of opposites spend most of their lives trying not to fall in love until one day, July 15th, no less, they take the leap.

“One Day” is many things. It’s a style parade of hair and clothes from the past twenty years and it’s an interesting take on how to tell a story but it’s also a little disconnected. I think the year-by-year format—we drop in on Jim and Anne every July 15 for twenty years—is the culprit. It begins to feel gimmicky by the early nineties and by the millennium almost feels as though it is playing out in real time.
Luckily the story is rescued by the chemistry between the leads. Sturgess brings an easy charm to the character, and his transformation from happy-go-lucky student to lounge lizard TV presenter is effective. Hathaway’s charm lies in the intelligence she brings to her characters. Here she plays a smarty-pants young woman set adrift in life, someone who is slowly finding the self confidence to be who she really wants to be. In Hathaway’s hands you never doubt that she’ll get there.

The decades long dance they do as they pretend not to be in love shows the chemistry between the two. The film has some serious structural flaws but the spark between the two of them forgive many of the film’s sins.

We’ve seen the ‘can men and women be friends’ thing a hundred times before but “One Day’s” “whatever happens tomorrow… we’ve had today” theme is effective and may even wring a tear or two from the most hard hearted of viewers.

Tags: 3 Stars, Drama

“Rocky,” the classic Sly Stalone movie set the template for many underdog sports movies that followed. How can you improve on the story? Add another Rocky! In the new MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) inspired film “Warrior” there’s two! two Rocky’s in one!

The story involves a pair of brothers, Tom and Brendan (Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton), on very different paths in life which lead them to the same place—an MMA cage match. Tom is a broken man, an Iraq war vet and former champion wrestler who returns home to see his father for the first time in fourteen years. Brendan, like so many people, is a victim of the recession. A former UFC fighter and current high school physics teacher, he’s three months away from foreclosure on his family home. Both men look to a grand prix, winner take all, knock down called Sparta, the War on the Shore in Atlantic City to solve their problems.

“Warrior” is a good mix of drama and action. Much time is spent establishing the back stories of the characters and while some of the plot machinations leading up to the final fisticuffs are a bit melodramatic, by the time the beating begins the audience is invested in both main characters.

Edgerton, an Australian actor best known on these shores for playing armed robber Barry 'Baz' Brown in “Animal Kingdom,” hands in a heartfelt performance as a man who will do anything for his family, and Nick Nolte brings some believable grit to the role of the newly sober father. But it is “Inception” star Tom Hardy’s brooding turn as a tortured soul battling demons, both internal and external, which steals the show. He’s a menacing mass of muscle-bound machismo that makes other tough guys like Vin Diesel look like your Aunt Mary. He’s intense.

So, go to “Warrior” for the acting and stay for the brutal finale, a MMA fight that spares no graphic detail. Punches are thrown, torsos pummeled and old wounds are healed. It’s a surprisingly emotional climax to a macho movie.

Tags: 3½ Stars, Drama

Rocky Balboa is a career underdog. In one classic film and 4 not so classic sequels the Italian Stallion has battled the odds and some heavy hitters to emerge bloodied but unbowed. He never gives up and that temerity shaped him into one of the screen’s greatest characters. Whether battling a vicious six and a half foot Russian boxer in the ring or his own personal demons outside the squared circle, audiences always rooted for him.

The question remains will they still root for him 30 years after the original film won 3 Academy Awards and 16 years after he last stepped out of the ring? As unbelievable as it might sound Sylvestor Stallone is back once again as the title character in Rocky Balboa, the final chapter (so he says) in the Rocky saga. Just as the man himself might say, “Yo! It ain’t over till it’s over.”

The new film is to long by half an hour, takes too long to get going and has way too many speeches about “having heart” and believing in yourself, but despite those minuses it has one big plus.

One big 60-year-old lumbering, beefy plus—Stallone as Rocky.

There is something in his dimwitted, but well-intentioned presence that goes beyond nostalgic appeal. Stallone isn’t a versatile actor, but when he’s in the Rocky Zone it’s hard to deny his appeal.

Stallone, working both in front of, and behind the camera, pays homage to the past, working much of the original Rocky lore to the new film, but more importantly using the anthemic Bill Conti Gonna Fly Now music from the first Rocky. I defy you not to pump your fist in the air when Rocky runs up those library steps to the famous Dunna nah, dunna nah, dunna nah soundtrack.

Tags: 3½ Stars, Drama

“The Help,” an adaptation of a 2009 best seller of the same name by Kathryn Stockett, has a tricky story to tell. Make it too uplifting and it will ring historically false; make it too realistically downbeat and summer audiences might stay away. Luckily, the story of a Southern Belle’s social awakening and the women who made it possible, hits most of the right notes.

Set in the weeks and months leading up to the 1963 death of African American civil rights activist Medgar Evers, “The Help” is the story of Jackson, Mississippi native “Skeeter” Phelan (Emma Stone), who comes home from four years at school to discover the woman who raised her, a maid named Constantine (Cicely Tyson), is no longer employed by her family. Her mother says she quit, but Skeeter has doubts. Meanwhile Skeeter takes a job writing a domestic maintenance column for the local newspaper. When she asks a friend’s maid, Aibileen (Viola Davis) for housekeeping tips she realizes there is more to the lives of the maids who raised her and her friends than she previously thought. With the help of a courageous group of housekeepers she tells the real story of the life of the maids, writing a book called “The Help.”

“The Help” is set at a time in the South when groups like the White Citizen’s Council had an office on Main Street and those same citizens didn’t see the irony of arriving at a charity event called The African Children’s Ball in a White’s Only taxi cab. The film gets the casual racism of the time right, offering up a sense of the era, but in a sanitized Hollywood sort of way. The brutal details of the book—stories of lynchings and corporal punishment for trifling matters—have been wiped away. Even the death of Evers, a turning point in the Civil Rights movement, happens off screen and goes largely unexplored.

There are some subtle moments that really ring true however. In one scene Skeeter visits Aibileen as she does her chores to try and convince her to be interviewed for the book. She’s meeting with her person to person, but when it starts to rain Skeeter rushes to get out of the rain without offering to help Aibileen gather up the rest of the laundry she had been bringing in from the clothes line. Skeeter wants to level the playing field between them, but she hasn’t yet completely let go of the idea of what is maid’s work and what is not.

But having said all that, this isn’t a history lesson. If you want real life grit rent “Eyes on the Prize”—Harry Hampton’s 1987 documentary on the American Civil Rights Movement from 1952 to 1965—because you won’t find it here. What you will find is a portrait of the South painted in broad strokes, performed by an eager and talented cast.

Some of the performances are pitched a bit over-the-top—Jessica Chastain, so understated in “The Tree of Life” seems positively ready to burst in the first half of this movie—but in the Southern Belle category, Emma Stone (and her football-sized eyes) brings some curly-haired determination to the role. She’s obviously different, the filmmakers seem to be telling us, because she’s the only one without a pulled back Beehive hairdo. Allison Janney as Skeeter's dramatic mother—“My daughter has upset my cancerous ulcer,” she cries at one point—really shines and Bryce Dallas Howard as Hilly Holbrook, the town’s well-born racist, is a chilling reminder of the genteel face of intolerance.

The performance that sells the picture, however, belongs to Academy Award nominee Viola Davis. As Aibileen she is the soul of the film, a woman who has been hurt by life but is still capable of nurturing the very people who wounded her. Even though she doesn’t have the movie’s showiest role—that’s Octavia Spencer as Minny Jackson—she’s still the film’s strongest and most memorable character.

“The Help” is a heartfelt and sincere story that could have benefited from a little less of those qualities and a little more realism.

Tags: Drama, 3 Stars

Helen Mirren seems to be in a new phase of her career. The English actress, best known for her Oscar winning portrayal of her majesty in The Queen and for recently taking top honors in the L.A. Fitness body of the year poll at age 66 is now also an action star. In “Reds” she was an ex-CIA agent alongside Bruce Willis, wearing pearls and shooting AK47s and this weekend she's an ex-Mossad agent with a secret.

When the movie opens it is 1997. Retired Mossad agents Rachel, David and Stefan (Helen Mirren, Ciarán Hinds and Tom Wilkinson) are heroes, acclaimed for their brave capture and execution of a notorious war criminal in 1966. But when new information about the case turns up, it threatens to expose a long held secret. Cut to an extended flashback sequence detailing the real details of the operation (with Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas, and Sam Worthington as the younger versions of the trio), including the romantic entanglement that complicated the mission. Back in 1997 Rachel comes out of retirement to uncover the truth and repay an emotional debt.

The flashback sequence makes up the bulk of the film so it's fair to say this isn't Helen Mirren's film, but her character Rachel's. Dame Helen and Chastain (in her third film this year) provide the movie's emotional core. Unusual for an espionage movie, the story is told through the eyes of a woman. Rachel is as tough as the men, but adds depth to what is essentially a pulpy spy story with a twist.

Performances are top notch (although some dodgy accents appear) but Sam Worthington, last year's it boy, underwhelms. Luckily Mirren, Chastain and the film's powerful sense of suspense pick up the slack.

Tags: Drama, 3½ Stars