Movie review by Greg Carlson

Jonathan Levine’s adaptation of Isaac Marion’s novel “Warm Bodies” endeavors to resurrect the durable zombie genre as a kinder, gentler post-apocalypse by injecting into the proceedings the seldom-used but not entirely novel device of romance. Pulse-crossed love hints at a sorta kinda “Romeo and Juliet” attraction between an undead flesh-eater known as R (Nicholas Hoult) and crush-object Julie (Teresa Palmer), a sympathetic human whose father runs the military defense protecting the surviving populace from the incursion of shambling corpses hungry for gray matter. Narrated by R via thoughts his rotting but lucid brain can still form even though his mouth cannot articulate the words, “Warm Bodies” manages to enter territory so few zombie properties even bother with these days: heartfelt earnestness.

Levine spends plenty of time establishing the yearning soulfulness of R, whose slim jeans and red hoodie mark him as something of an emo-cadaver. When not overwhelmed by the urge to dine on the bodies of the living, R resides in the cabin of a jetliner, where he spins records from his impressive collection of vinyl and scavenges abandoned treasures like a decaying WALL-E. One day, along with a pack of shambling ghouls, R encounters Julie’s patrol, and overwhelmed by something that transcends his flatlined state, refrains from killing the young woman. He protects her from the horde, and her presence sparks in R a gradual return to a condition of vitality.

Disappointingly, “Warm Bodies” does not fully commit to directly addressing what amounts to its elephant in the room: necrophilia. Hoult’s expressive eyes and tousled hair, which contrast with his ghastly pallor, are undoubtedly present to soften the “ick factor” that has never really been a significant problem for cinematic vampires. Even so, the “getting to know you” sections of the film in which R pines for Julie are restrained and chaste, even when some very taboo passion is needed. The most devoted genre fans may be vaguely reminded of Brian Yuzna’s 1993 “Return of the Living Dead 3,” in which screenwriter John Penney explored the romance of a living boy and his reanimated girlfriend.

“Warm Bodies” could have used a rewrite on John Malkovich’s General Grigio, Julie’s grieving, vigilant father. Malkovich’s presence is welcome, but the black-and-white rigidity of his anti-zombie position demands greater nuance, particularly if the audience is going to believe any late occurring change of heart. The final sections of “Warm Bodies,” where Malkovich factors most, are the film’s least effective, driven by fights and chases involving the speedy, aggressive “Bonies,” dried-out zombies who have decayed past the point of rehabilitation. The film never really bothers to define its own spin on zombie mythology, and the audience is asked to accept the death-to-life reversal in other zombies that has been seemingly triggered by R’s affection for Julie.

The courtship of the Shakespeare-inspired pair is hampered by an issue just as thorny as R’s stiff, checked-out status: the disturbing reality that R dispatches Julie’s boyfriend, and by eating his brains can access the victim’s thoughts, visions, and experiences. Reminiscent of unethical Patrick’s voyeuristic manipulation of Clementine in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” this eerie story element may give some viewers pause no matter R’s otherworldly sweetness. Coupled with the suggestion that R deliberately delays helping Julie get home, (making him a kidnapper) these challenging plot threads need more sophisticated and thoughtful resolution than Levine can offer.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Was there any doubt that “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” was going to be a terrible movie? Dumped in the January wilderness reserved for the weakest cinematic product, Scandinavian filmmaker Tommy Wirkola’s busy spin on the Brothers Grimm ejects most of the folktale’s ideas of interest. Surprisingly, Wirkola finds no use for the themes exploring cannibalism and abandonment, opting instead to visit the siblings as grown-up mercenaries who have developed a talent for dispatching evil crones. The edible house of confection remains (in one of the movie’s only artful touches of production design), but this revisionist concoction, with its endless supply of rapid-fire weapons and punky leather duds, aims for the same kind of territory covered in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

Wirkola, whose low-budget horror-comedy “Dead Snow” attracted some kind of cult following (whatever that means in the fractured, narrow audience slices of the post-YouTube landscape) with its zombie Nazis, obviously intends for the audience to laugh as much as cringe at “Hansel & Gretel,” but the numbing repetition of blood and guts rocketing toward the camera’s lens is tired by the third time it happens, and downright annoying once you lose count. A few gore-free gags flirt with the alleviation of audience malaise – the woodcut-style images of missing children on bottles of fresh milk is worth a smile – but Wirkola shows little interest in developing any of his characters beyond their most basic impulses.

Jeremy Renner’s performance has reviewers scrambling to paint a picture of disaffection or phone-it-in boredom, but maybe his diabetic Hansel’s blood-sugar is just low. As Gretel, Gemma Arterton is given a little more to do in subplots involving the misogynist gang of thugs led by corrupt, dunderpate Sheriff Berrigner (Peter Stormare) and a gruesome, hulking ogre named Edward (Derek Mears). Famke Janssen, playing head witch Muriel, hasn’t been particularly gracious describing her role in interviews, indicating she took the part for the cash. The rest of the movie could use a little of Janssen’s honesty.

A grown-up brother/sister team based on iconic fairy tale figures carries the screenwriting challenge of establishing chemistry without suggesting incestuous feelings, and Wirkola mostly avoids the Luke and Leia weirdness. One scene, in which the siblings are reunited following a heavily plotted separation, sets off the  creepy alarm, but the leads are both given, more or less, subplots involving love interests. Hansel gets naked and submerges in healing waters with a helpful white witch in a moment that Andrew Barker cleverly describes as a “pretense for skinny-dipping [that] makes Prince’s Lake Minnetonka line seem like the height of subtle seduction.” Less appealing is Gretel’s fawning suitor, a stupefied superfan ready to cop a feel when Gretel is unconscious.

The whole thing reeks of desperation, and the liberal use of anachronistic catchphrases laden with profanity might have worked if the action wasn’t an endless display of relentlessly similar combat scenes. As the movie builds toward its showdown climax, a set-piece involving a convention of witches from surrounding territories, the filmmakers proudly show off a gallery of nasties, but it is too little, too late. The outcome is guaranteed, the action beats come from a kit, and the viewer is so far ahead of it all that some will make for the exits before the tacked-on epilogue.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

For those willing to accept the often blunt beauty-and-the-beast theme that has been a go-to story device far longer than the movies have been around, Jacques Audiard’s “Rust and Bone” can be as bracing as the ocean swim taken by Marion Cotillard’s Stephanie, a Cote d’Azur marine park killer whale trainer whose legs are amputated following a freak accident on the job. Based on Craig Davidson’s short story collection of the same title, director Jacques Audiard uses the film to examine brutishness, grief, the limits of the body, and the intersection of physical and psychological pain.

Cotillard’s star power looms over the movie, but the principal figure is Matthias Schoenaerts’ Ali, a miserable, aimless tough who, along with his young son, relocates to his sister’s place in Antibes long after his luck has run out. Ali’s emotional maturity is no greater than his kid’s, and Audiard sets up a minefield of opportunities for poor choices as Ali takes dead-end gigs as a club bouncer and as an assistant to a shady, quasi-legal surveillance tech. Before long, Ali finds his way to underground, bare-knuckle street fighting, an activity we imagine he would undertake even if it didn’t pay out in cash. Without functioning on the operatic level of “The Master,” Schoenaert’s character is every bit as crude and unlikable as Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell.

Cotillard’s Stephanie is as complex as Ali is primal and pitiless. They reconnect during Stephanie’s rehabilitation and even though the circumstances of their acquaintance might outwardly point toward the contrived banalities of the most sentimental melodramas (she’ll help him, he’ll mend her), Cotillard easily transcends any limits the material might place upon her. Following a matter-of-fact agreement to initiate a sexual relationship merely as “friends with benefits,” Stephanie, who wants to know if “it still works,” is as surprised as we are to discover deeper feelings – apparently unreciprocated – for Ali.

Among other things, “Rust and Bone” functions on one level as an unlikely love story, and while the enjoyment derived by the audience in watching the fractured, broken couple lurch one step forward and two steps back may not always match the pleasure Audiard takes in the accounting, “Rust and Bone” has a way of setting its hooks. On paper, the content of the narrative would be at home in the silent era, but Audiard pulls off the unlikely feat of rehabilitating many of the weakest tendencies of stories about disability, about fighting, and about parental responsibility.

Audiard deliberately withholds some of the interiority that would reveal more of Ali and Stephanie to us, but the lack of viewer privilege serves to reinforce Ali’s ugly, tactless shortcomings as father, brother, friend, and lover. We wonder briefly whether Stephanie, wallowing in the abject and flirting with self-pity (she has “gauche” and “droite” tattooed on her thighs), possesses enough self-awareness and self-possession to realize that adjusting Ali’s basic instincts is a fool’s errand. It’s a safe bet that Ali’s inability to express any great measure of empathy for Stephanie creates the conditions by which she can comfortably interact with him. There, and elsewhere, the masterful Audiard is more than capable of finding the sweet spot between the flesh and the spirit.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Residing somewhere inside the cacophony of the debate over whether Kathryn Bigelow’s harrowing “Zero Dark Thirty” legitimately “endorses” torture is one of the most elementary functions of drama: the depiction of a thing does not necessarily indicate the dramatist’s affirmation of that thing. In the Theban trio, Sophocles sought to examine, among other ideas, the conflict between divine law and human law, but we don’t spend much time accusing the tragedian of championing incest or parricide. Bigelow would have erred by not addressing the “enhanced interrogation” techniques applied to the so-called enemy combatants detained after 9/11, and her film, stylistically dependent on a high degree of believability, at least allows us to ask whether it takes a bad person to catch a bad person.

With its clinically procedural structure, deliberate jargon, and nimble editing, “Zero Dark Thirty” belongs to the tradition of political and military thriller that reflects back to the viewer what he or she seeks to find. Compare two voices in the “New York Times.” Manohla Dargis says, “[This] juxtaposition of the abuse and the massacre suggests, in cinematic terms, that torture does not save lives.” Frank Bruni wrote that the depiction of torture as placed in the film “produces information vital to the pursuit of the world’s most wanted man.” There is something undeniably involving about a movie that can simultaneously be described as pandering to the Obama administration and the one led by George W. Bush.

The rhetoric surrounding the suggestion that the filmmakers somehow managed to obtain access to classified information is potentially as fascinating as the torture question, but Bigelow’s dedication to the detailed reconstruction of the compound raid itself – the climactic showstopper that the audience eagerly awaits as a satisfying narrative payoff to the grind of the connect-the-dots timeline that takes up the majority of the film – carries with it a set of challenges. Even if one accepts the claim that Bigelow carefully withholds opinion via the impassive, mask-like visage of Jessica Chastain’s CIA agent Maya (not to mention the spare use of Alexandre Desplat’s score), the final section of “Zero Dark Thirty” vibrates with the awesome, frightening power of America’s military machine.

As soon as the fire-eating Navy SEAL team members are first briefed on their top-secret objective, “Zero Dark Thirty” crackles with the age-old sense of America’s dizzying military superiority. Bigelow’s use of point-of-view, night vision green imagery via handheld photography places the viewer shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers. Given the outcome of Operation Neptune Spear and the manner in which it is imagined cinematically, I would venture a guess that applications to any corresponding military programs will not be in any danger of decline.

I for one do not believe, like Peter Rainer, that Bigelow has made an amoral film. As a work of contemporary historical fiction, we can wring our hands that people will watch “Zero Dark Thirty” and accept it as the document of record on the death of Osama bin Laden. Similar arguments about “history according to the movies” were offered when Oliver Stone explored a network of theories both plausible and ridiculous in “JFK” in 1991. With its release so soon after the events it dramatizes, “Zero Dark Thirty” feels very much like a movie of its moment. I wonder how we’ll think and talk about it two decades from now.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A troubled, manipulative disaster spectacle with a problematic point-of-view, “The Impossible” imagines the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake through the eyes of a wealthy white family whose Christmas vacation is interrupted by a horrific natural catastrophe that would become – based on total lives lost – the worst tsunami in recorded history. Long on the powerful emotions that come with the woman-versus-nature conflict and short on the vision that would provide a breadth of context for the estimated quarter million dead, “The Impossible” employs state-of-the-art special effects to accomplish one of the bizarre things big-budget filmmaking manages so well: placing the viewer with uncanny verisimilitude inside the heart of an event nobody would want to experience firsthand.

Unlike several of the disaster-suspense thrillers popular in the 1970s, “The Impossible” skips the narrative device in which a large group of survivors representing a variety of economic backgrounds is followed, instead turning its attention to the five members that make up the nuclear Bennett family (their nationality switched from Spanish). Considering the events depicted in the film occur in Thailand, director Juan Antonia Bayona makes a colossal error in virtually ignoring the native inhabitants in favor of the tourists. Structurally, the movie divides its time between Naomi Watts’ seriously injured Maria, who manages to stay with oldest son Lucas, while Ewan McGregor’s panic-stricken Henry looks after the two youngest brothers.

Clint Eastwood’s weird 2010 misfire “Hereafter” dramatized the same historical event in one of its interlocking storylines, and the depiction of the tsunami’s arrival in that film earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects. Given its greater emphasis on the particulars of the disaster and the skill with which the filmmakers imagine it, “The Impossible” is almost certain to replicate that feat. The HBO/BBC miniseries “Tsunami: The Aftermath,” another fictionalized account of the earthquake, attempted to tackle wider political issues, but like “The Impossible,” was criticized for its lack of interest in the flood’s native victims.

Regardless of its “true story” pedigree, “The Impossible” stumbles with several scenes and moments that throb with naivete, condescension, or both. Worst among these artless insults is a nighttime reverie in which Geraldine Chaplin, who also appeared in Bayona’s effective horror-suspense nightmare “The Orphanage,” discusses the life and death of stars while comforting one of Bennett boys. Another trick, de rigueur in the genre, demands a few split-second near-misses as the family members come within an eyelash of reuniting in the chaos of the disaster’s aftermath. Predictably, there are also instances of cruel selfishness interspersed with moments of generosity and compassion.

Even though more award season buzz has been directed toward Watts than McGregor, the talented performer’s onscreen time is limited by her character’s predicament: a life-threatening leg gash that places Maria at the threshold of death’s door once the adrenalized rush of negotiating the roiling hell is surmounted. While McGregor is given a juicy scene in which he places an emotional phone call, Watts spends the second half of the film in pre-surgical limbo (as Kevin Jagernauth effectively puts it, “If there is an Oscar for moaning in pain, Watts will certainly be a lock”). Similarly, the viewer is immobilized, in shock and feeling helpless until “The Impossible” fulfills the promise of its title.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

One of the questions nagging David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook” as it divides critical opinion like so many of the filmmaker’s previous movies asks whether his adaptation of Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel wallows in the feel-good, romantic movie clichés Russell once (seemingly) rejected. Has Russell, following seven Oscar nominations and a pair of acting wins for “The Fighter,” acquiesced to the corporate conventions demanded of so many Hollywood hit machines? Is filmmaking somehow less “personal” if the story involves impossibly attractive stars playing characters “struggling” with mental illness?

Some answers might be found in the pages of Quick’s often funny book, one of those buzzed-about debuts optioned for cinema prior to its publication. In an interview with Mike Ryan, Russell describes receiving the novel from Sydney Pollack as a project that was to have been made prior to “The Fighter.” The filmmaker worked through multiple drafts of the script, significantly altering story elements, dropping several subplots, reimagining characters, and perhaps most notably overhauling Pat Sr., a figure whose presence in the novel is as cold and authoritative as Robert De Niro’s performance is tender and fluid.

The principal romantic relationship, between Bradley Cooper’s bi-polar Pat and Jennifer Lawrence’s grieving Tiffany, makes the transition from the page largely intact, and Russell doesn’t blink at the obvious genre requirement demanding the final reel union of the pharmaceutical-dependent pair (it wasn’t a problem for Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, or Gregory La Cava either). Ostensibly, Pat is wholly committed to reconciliation with his estranged wife Nikki, whose adultery triggered the physical outburst that landed Pat in an institution and now places a restraining order between them, but from the moment Tiffany shows up, Pat will be the only one convinced he still has any hope of restoring his old life.

Like nearly any classic screwball comedy, Pat’s relationship with Tiffany is predicated on the unlikely: because she has the necessary access, she will deliver Pat’s letters to Nikki as long as Pat agrees to dance with Tiffany in a competition. Quick’s novel arguably makes better use of such a harebrained premise, but Russell apparently sees less value in the mechanics of plot when opportunities for charged dialogue and physical closeness are so ripe. Quick is specific about the music that so deeply affects Pat, but the movie makes use of different selections. One look at the delightfully amateurish medley mashup choreographed by Tiffany for the dance finale explains why: Russell aches for the unexpected shifts in tone that might otherwise threaten the consistency of a less interesting world.

“Silver Linings Playbook” reiterates the director’s strengths, from his confidence with noisy ensembles to his appreciation for unfiltered, truth-hurts declarations. Russell’s respect for the messy, impolite exchange has manifested in some of the director’s greatest moments (often around dinner tables, as “Flirting with Disaster” and “I Heart Huckabees” attest). “Silver Linings Playbook” starts as a story about a delusional young man but by the time the title reaches fruition, it might have transformed into a story about a young woman just as determined to find her own redemption from the past.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

When Stephen Rebello’s “Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho” was published in 1990, cinephiles drooled over the riveting account of the landmark movie’s production history. Praised by fellow film historians and hardcore admirers of the Master of Suspense, Rebello’s work remains, more than two decades later, one of the most entertaining discussions of the construction, care, and feeding of a movie. A non-fiction film adaptation chronicling the events described in the book might have made the better choice as a theatrical motion picture, but instead we are left with Sacha Gervasi’s colorful, odd fabrication.

Fixing its gaze on the behind-closed-doors dynamics of long-married Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville, “Hitchcock” will never be mistaken for the precision-engineered narratives brought to life by the great filmmaker. Expectedly, Anthony Hopkins can’t quite escape the long shadow that comes with playing an iconic figure whose voice and physicality prove tough, if not impossible, to effectively crack. Helen Mirren keeps a straight face and fares better than her co-star, breathing some life into Alma’s position as the wounded, overlooked, and undervalued “behind every great man” device. The unfortunate surprise is that “Hitchcock” fails to burrow deep into “Psycho,” content instead to synopsize the most predictable and superficial anecdotes when it is not inventing fodder for the marital melodrama.

There are few things “Hitchcock” doesn’t manage to goof up, from the lurching shifts in tone to the ill-advised decision to bring Ed Gein to life as a phantasm that haunts Hitchcock’s dreams and stokes his anxieties about Alma. The broad portrayal of Anthony Perkins by James D’Arcy as a twitchy, closeted homosexual exploited for his “duality” would be simultaneously laughable and insulting, if Perkins wasn’t treated like a minor player. Scarlett Johansson’s Janet Leigh functions apparently to argue that Hitchcock wasn’t always a creep to his leading ladies, but Raymond Durgnat, whose “A Long Hard Look at Psycho” matches Rebello’s writing as the most detailed examination of the film to date, would likely have been disappointed that the filming of the shower scene comes and goes with little fanfare.

The most crushing disappointment of Gervasi’s film is twofold. First, the movie takes very little interest in the fascinating nuts-and-bolts details of the actual production process of “Psycho.” Hitchcock’s collaborators are given short shrift onscreen, feeding into the mythology of singular auteurism even as Alma at one point decries that very idea. Gervasi leaves out any really meaningful interactions with the likes of Saul Bass and Bernard Herrmann. Joseph Stefano sweats nervously in the surprising form of Ralph Macchio in one brief scene. Robert Bloch’s misfortunes in life translate to the fiction: he does not even appear as a character in the movie.

Second, the filmmaker wholly misjudges the necessity of a rotting red herring in Hitch’s suspicions of Alma’s flirtatious relationship with Danny Huston’s prowling Whitfield Cook – the previous Hitchcock collaborator who doesn’t even rate a mention in Rebello’s book. One can only imagine why Rebello, who provided rewrites to John J. McLaughlin’s script, would advocate for shifting attention away from “Psycho” to speculation about Alma’s fidelity. No saint himself (as a pile of starlet headshots in his study and a naughty peep through the wall of Vera Miles’ dressing room attest), Hitchcock is positioned in the movie as the victimized spouse when the dramatic focus might have been more effective and more accurate had the polarity been reversed.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Even though Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” presents its narrative as an enigma concerning the disappearance and rumored suicide of singer-songwriter Rodriguez, once the movie gets underway the true mystery emerges: how could a brilliant artist release a pair of masterful, transcendent albums and not be recognized in his native country for contributions to recorded music? There are many possible answers to that question, and the cynics have dismissively suggested that the quest to uncover a lost, slept-on, or forgotten classic overshadows and overpowers the art. Either way, engaging Rodriguez’s sounds is like stepping into a time machine.

Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, the Dylanesque poet of Detroit’s inner city impoverished and working class, is the very embodiment of the rock cliché “but we’re big in Japan,” except that the international audience in this particular case consisted of anti-apartheid protesters in South Africa. Even as Rodriguez’s sounds fell on deaf ears in America, South Africans like Craig Bartholomew-Strydom and Stephen Segerman assert in the movie that in their country, Rodriguez was every bit as popular as the Rolling Stones, with record sales estimated between half a million and a million copies.

As a story of rediscovery and delayed appreciation, “Searching for Sugar Man” avoids too many tangible villains. The film is justifiably more interested in silver linings and happy endings, but Bendjelloul does see fit to include a section detailing the recording industry’s shameful, execrable treatment of performers who never saw a dime of royalties from record sales. Some follow-the-money sleuthing leads the investigators to producer and Sussex Records founder Clarence Avant, whose on-camera defensiveness and irritability do him no favors regardless of whether he personally profited on the distribution deals that so widely disseminated Rodriguez’s music throughout South Africa.

Aside from the muddiness over Avant’s possible culpability in Rodriguez’s lost earnings, the greatest deficiencies in the film are easily recognizable as deliberate choices made by Bendjelloul. Information is withheld, in large measure to lay the foundation of Rodriguez’s growing status as a legend. The filmmaker also delays the appearance of Rodriguez longer than necessary. Fortunately, the late arrival of Rodriguez in person is not similarly applied to his songs, and there is no question that the recordings are as important to the story as the presence of the man himself.  The music is so good, “Searching for Sugar Man” will introduce scores of new fans to masterful tunes like “Crucify Your Mind” and “Cause.”

In addition to the content from “Cold Fact” and “Coming from Reality,” Bendjelloul includes material from Rodriguez’s unfinished third record. “Can’t Get Away” appeared as a bonus track on the 2009 U.S. re-issue of “Coming from Reality,” and it makes one wonder how the songcraft might have evolved had Rodriguez found an enthusiastic audience in his prime. “Searching for Sugar Man” never attempts to address Rodriguez’s feelings about the long, strange trip he took. The singer talks about working in construction and demolition after he left the record business. His daughters describe a failed Detroit city council campaign. No discussion of Rodriguez’s romantic partner or partners is included. “Searching for Sugar Man” leaves so many questions unanswered, Rodriguez emerges at the end every bit as unknowable as he was at the beginning.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Hard-boiled crime fiction writer George Higgins’s 1974 novel “Cogan’s Trade” is the basis for writer-director Andrew Dominik’s self-conscious genre entry “Killing Them Softly,” a jazzy acting showcase that embraces both the crime-as-business and style-above-all dicta that have steered gangster movies since the birth of the form. Brad Pitt is comfortable as a calm, exacting mob enforcer hired to clean up the mess resulting from a card game robbery. The actor reteams with Richard Jenkins and James Gandolfini, two previous co-stars whose presence instantly increases the aggregate performance I.Q. of the cast.

Pitt, whose interest in working with Dominik helped secure financing for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” is more relaxed and arguably better when playing the morally compromised antihero. His best scenes in “Killing Them Softly” are the ones in which he discusses strategy with Jenkins’ suit-and-tie messenger and recognizes the error of bringing in Gandolfini’s no longer competent muscle. Gandolfini’s grotesque is riveting, and as soon as he appears on screen, Dominik downshifts the pace, accommodating the actor’s formidable skill in a manner not unlike the way Peter Yates appreciated Robert Mitchum in “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” another film adapted from a George Higgins book.

Dominik’s least necessary update to Higgins – and really the only deliberate indication that the movie could not take place in the 1970s – moves the action to 2008. Televisions and radios playing soundbites from George W. Bush and Barack Obama highlight the sense of impending economic doom descending on America’s poor and working class. Unlike the similar “recent period” tactic employed by the Coens in “The Big Lebowski,” however, Dominik does not know when to quit, and the unsubtle motif wears out its welcome soon after the slick, arrestingly sound-designed opening title sequence.

The worlds Dominik chooses to investigate pulse with testosterone and masculinity. There is little room here for women and the only female with a significant speaking role in “Killing Them Softly” is Linara Washington’s degraded prostitute, who appears in a brief exchange with Gandolfini’s coarse alcoholic. The absence of women signals many things, but chief among them may be the failure of the corporate model Dominik explores via crime metaphor. That women are so invisible as human beings in the realm of wiseguys, driven as it is by unrelenting physical violence, is not particularly surprising. Dominik’s reliance on the misogyny cultivated in the filthy talk of Higgins’ ugly brutes, is, however, problematic.

Alongside the bleak, shabby, industrial environments inhabited by the lowlifes and outcasts who populate Higgins’ imagination, a crafty sense of very black comedy accompanies the unsavory felonies. Dominik cited “Blue Velvet” as one of his favorite movies in the “Sight & Sound” “greatest films poll” coverage this year, and the influence of David Lynch’s noir masterpiece is in evidence during a slow-motion, rain-soaked hit underscored by Ketty Lester’s “Love Letters.” Less overtly, Lynch’s gallows humor weltanschauung leaves its mark on what may be Dominik’s saving grace. With the exception of Pitt’s savvy operator Jackie Cogan, who knows how to get paid, the denizens of “Killing Them Softly” are hapless and hopeless underclass goons ready to be sacrificed for their foolishness.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Ang Lee’s best and worst tendencies as a filmmaker are manifested in the visual smorgasbord “Life of Pi,” a rainbow-colored adaptation of the popular 2001 novel by Yann Martel. Cutting back and forth between the awesome spectacle contained within the see-it-to-believe-it story of a man and a tiger sharing space on a lifeboat and the leaden, prosaic didacticism of the scenes in which the title character recounts his unbelievable tale to an eager writer, Lee insists on showing and telling the audience when the former is cinematically preferable to the latter. The result is a flawed but intoxicating experience brimming with luscious compositions undercut somewhat by Lee’s insistence on unwelcome over-explanation.

Martel’s Booker Prize-winner seemingly belongs to the class of literature suggestive of the catnip adjective “unfilmable.” Alternately introspective and preachy, the fantasy fable of spiritual truth-seeking may strike some as an optimistic, New Age variation on “The Old Man and the Sea,” but both works surely depend upon the will to endure, exemplified via Hemingway’s veritable epithet  “grace under pressure.” Perhaps someday a film will be made detailing the strange case of Martel’s erroneous recollection of an unflattering Updike review of Moacyr Scliar’s 1981 “Max and the Cats,” a novella in which a shipwreck survivor is stranded on a dinghy with a jaguar.

The logistics of photographing a Bengal tiger and a human being in close quarters depend on the illusion of proximity and the specialized skill sets of animal trainers and CGI artists. Lee succeeds mightily in his realization of maneater Richard Parker, and the sinewy beast takes on the substantial mantle of simultaneous symbol and flesh-and-blood feline. Newcomer Suraj Sharma plays Pi in the sections of the film dealing with the aftermath of the shipwreck, and while the actor gets the job done, one wishes that Lee had found a performer with the presence and depth of Irrfan Khan. Khan nearly manages to save the framing scenes in which the older Pi recounts his crucible, but those sections of the movie reek with the annoying sense that the viewer is not smart enough to discern the subtext.

While the scenes of Pi and Richard Parker lost and adrift rightfully receive the majority of attention over the tedious conversations of Rafe Spall’s unnamed writer and the older Pi, Lee also includes a third narrative trajectory establishing the hero’s childhood fascination with Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Set in India in the former French colony Pondicherry, the exposition lays out the interfaith and mono/polytheistic framework that will contribute to the explanation accompanying the surprise ending of the story. Screenwriter David Magee also adds a love interest that does not exist in the novel, a reasonable alteration that raises the emotional stakes of Pi’s departure from India.

Like “Avatar,” a movie to which “Life of Pi” has been frequently compared, Lee’s facility with technology in the service of image-making trumps the shortcomings of the script. The director lavishes painterly detail, sometimes combining incongruous foregrounds and backgrounds in thrilling tableaux, on the stylized world inhabited for 227 days by the young man and the tiger, and his investment in the natural world and its menagerie of inhabitants approaches the same level of interest exhibited over the decades by Terrence Malick. The beauty of sky and sea, imagined in the quiet, placid calm and the roiling, tumultuous chaos, engages the senses in a way that verbal expression cannot approach.