Movie review by Greg Carlson

Fleet, confident, and cognizant of its genre obligations, “The Call” is a surprisingly effective white-knuckle kidnapping thriller. Showcasing Halle Berry in what seems like her first decent role in ages, director Brad Anderson’s nerve-rattling exercise in split-second decision making owes its most significant debts to Alfred Hitchcock, who might have enjoyed the high-concept series of problems to solve and would probably have excused a few of the film’s lapses in narrative logic. Hitchcock’s own movies often incorporated the kind of unbelievable coincidence dispatched to pump the narrative adrenaline of “The Call.”

Berry’s Jordan Turner is a seasoned LA 911 operator who works in “The Hive,” a sophisticated, high-tech call center that serves as the nexus between all manner of trouble and the first responders dispatched to assist. While the impressive set design imagines a state-of-the-art mission control, “The Call” economically establishes the stressful climate where highly trained dispatchers are always just one click away from unspeakable mayhem. The Russian roulette nature of emergency services means that some calls will not end well. One day, during a home invasion crisis, Jordan arguably makes a mistake that costs a young woman her life.

One of the chief pleasures of “The Call” is the number of refreshingly egalitarian depictions of work and other relationships involving women. The filmmakers credited with the story, Jon Bokenkamp and spouses Richard and Nicole D’Ovidio, deliberately opted for a female lead after Ms. D’Ovidio heard a National Public Radio story on the topic of 911 calls. The movie’s core relationship develops (largely in real time) between Jordan and Abigail Breslin’s Casey Welson, the abducted teenager taken by the same perpetrator involved in Jordan’s fateful earlier call. While “The Call” does subject Breslin’s character to a lurid bondage display, the film’s sensibilities are fare less offensive than the casual sexism of the weekend’s other studio release, “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.”

“The Call” loses much of its momentum once the bad guy arrives at his hideout destination with Casey. The previously taut script abruptly shifts attention to the murderer’s elaborate preparations in a plot device that thieves from “Psycho” and “The Silence of the Lambs.” This misstep is a common variation on the “Fallacy of the Talking Killer,” identified by Roger Ebert as the trope facilitating the rescue of the imperiled by a pokey, unhurried villain who messes around just long enough for help to arrive. Additionally, the audience is asked to believe that level-headed Jordan would fail to contact Officer Paul, her caring, on-the-case boyfriend played by Morris Chestnut, en route to the creepy, isolated location where her gut tells her Casey is imprisoned.

While Jordan’s brand of last act derring-do nearly functions as a kind of stylistic requirement ala “heroine confronts monster all by herself,” the denouement adds a wild rape-revenge comeuppance initiated by traumatized Casey (possible, if not plausible) and participated in by Jordan (logically suspect and wholly out of character). This coda is far and away the movie’s riskiest gambit, and some viewers will reject the farfetched turn of events that functions in practically every way like a violation of tone in the movie’s previously established universe.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

While the comparisons are as inevitable as they may or may not be unfair, Sam Raimi’s “Oz the Great and Powerful,” like any Emerald City media post-dating the 1939 musical film, will try and fail to match the transcendent, resplendent sights and sounds of what is surely one of the most beloved motion pictures ever imagined. Plenty of other entries exploring aspects of or paying homage to the Baum canon have come and gone, including the author’s own trio of shorts that appeared in 1914 and 1915. None of them, from “The Wiz” to “Return to Oz” to “Wild at Heart,” has managed to put a dent in the indestructible armor of MGM’s “Technicolor triumph.”

As the title magician of this so-called prequel, James Franco has been both praised and denounced for his performance. Whether you find his womanizing charlatan Oscar Diggs redeemable and endearing or self-conscious and ineffective, one of the glaring losses to the franchise is the lack of a female protagonist. As played by Judy Garland, Dorothy Gale’s richness of character is communicated through a delicate balance of tenacity, courage, and endangered innocence. By comparison, the grown-up Oscar’s parallel odyssey pales. “Oz the Great and Powerful” is not without a trio of outwardly powerful females, but the script’s thudding repetitiveness demolishes any sustained interest in Rachel Weisz’s Evanora (the likely Wicked Witch of the East) and Michelle Williams’ Glinda, whose function as Diggs’ love interest is ill-advised.

Mila Kunis’ physical attractiveness contributes to one of the film’s only operative casting surprises given her not-so-secret metamorphosis, but the performer is given shockingly little of importance to do. By the time the smoke clears, you’ll be pining hard for Garland, Frank Morgan, Margaret Hamilton, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, and Billie Burke. The human beings in the new movie are overshadowed by the high-gloss polish of the CG environments, suggesting that “Oz the Great and Powerful” is as much an animated movie as it is a live action one. In terms of visual style, though not narrative exposition, the monochrome Academy ratio prologue outstrips any of the saturated baloney that transpires once we arrive in Oz.

One of the insurmountable problems presented by “Oz the Great and Powerful” occurs in the personae of substandard characters who join the future wizard on the Yellow Brick Road. Zach Braff’s Finley, a painfully dull flying monkey who engages in interminable scenes of malfunctioning dialogue, competes with Joey King’s China Girl for the title of least welcome new sidekick. Others, including Bill Cobbs and Tony Cox, are so poorly realized and saddled with such half-witted inanities, you can’t help but feel embarrassed for them as they spit out David Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell Kapner’s lousy dialogue.

Plot parallels to “Army of Darkness” and especially the science-embracing “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” climax aside, “Oz the Great and Powerful” feels scrubbed free of any of the subversive intelligence that got Raimi noticed in the first place. Sure, being given the keys to a cherished property governed by the strict control of a corporate parent assumes the likelihood of a steam-pressed, machine-tooled entertainment by executive committee, but next to Raimi’s previous feature “Drag Me to Hell,” the sterile, imitation “Oz” is never breathless but always out of breath.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A measured memento mori coiled with the director’s signature refusal to indicate any absolute moral transparency, Michael Haneke’s “Amour” meticulously chronicles the physical decline of an octogenarian music teacher whose gradual slide into end-of-life helplessness is witnessed and attended to by her husband. Confining the action almost entirely to the Parisian apartment shared by Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva), Haneke frames the action – or lack thereof – in long takes of the quotidian repetitions (eating, using the bathroom, getting into or out of bed) that the able-bodied take for granted.

Until now, to American audiences Emmanuelle Riva was best known for her turn in Alain Resnais’ 1959 classic “Hiroshima mon amour,” even though the performer has appeared in movies directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, Jaco Van Dormael, Jean-Pierre Melville, Georges Franju, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and recently, Julie Delpy. Currently in her mid-eighties, Riva constructs a harrowing, immersive portrait of a woman who has lived a productive life. Sally Chivers writes that “silvering screen” movies commonly use disability narratives, so much so that old age and illness in film are more often then not co-located. Chivers’ observations do not diminish the poignancy of “Amour,” which can certainly take a position in the company of work like “Away from Her,” and perhaps one day “Ikiru”  “Wild Strawberries,” and “The Ballad of Narayama” (both Kinoshita and Imamura).

Arguably, “Amour” is Haneke’s most conventional and straightforward examination of the human psyche, outwardly exhibiting fewer signs of the twisty provocations and manipulations that mark the challenging experiences of “Code Unknown,” “The Piano Teacher,” “Cache,” “The White Ribbon,” and especially both versions of the disturbing “Funny Games.” The accessibility of “Amour,” however, should not be mistaken as an invitation for audience consensus – a characteristic Haneke deliberately avoids. Instead, the movie provides through Georges’ consciousness the ambiguity and mystery necessary for self-reflection.

While Riva has garnered more press attention than Trintignant thanks to her Academy Award nomination, the narrative of “Amour” is filtered through the point of view of husband, partner, and father Georges. The audience is invited to share his nightmares, and in an oddly moving and touching motif, we also see his reactions to the surprise appearance of a pigeon that gains access to the apartment. As Anna’s condition worsens, daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert) asks her father what happens next, and Georges answers by saying, in essence, “the same as what happened before, until it is over.”

Haneke has spoken of his disdain for what he described as the disempowerment of the spectator in American film, and even though watching his movies can result in feelings of dread, anxiety, and alarm, there is no question the auteur continually makes a conscious effort to achieve the kind of transcendence that Paul Schrader means when talking about the cinema of Robert Bresson. Like Bresson, Haneke is unrelenting in his quest to both understand and visualize the internal. In interviews regarding “Amour,” Haneke claims that it was not his intention to make a film about dying, but rather to examine the question of how we cope with the suffering of the ones we love. That is a fine line distinction, and there’s no question “Amour” is both.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

WARNING: The following review reveals key plot information. Read only if you have seen “Side Effects.”

The politics of Big Pharma front a wicked, sleazy homage to psychosexual thrillers in Steven Soderbergh’s smartypants divertissement “Side Effects,” an enjoyable genre workout that gleefully mashes up Alfred Hitchcock and Joe Eszterhas without batting an eye. Fooling the audience into believing the movie’s point-of-view will favor the mental health struggles of Rooney Mara’s Emily Taylor, Soderbergh cunningly reveals that Jude Law’s Dr. Jonathan Banks is the film’s real fulcrum. Working from a script by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns, Soderbergh, as usual, keeps the gears turning so efficiently it isn’t until the credits roll that you begin to wonder how badly you’ve been hoodwinked.

Emily’s husband Martin (Channing Tatum) emerges from a four-year prison sentence for insider trading anxious to reclaim his marriage and his career. Emily struggles with the changes, and soon after Martin’s release, steers her car into the wall of a parking garage in an apparent suicide attempt. Psychiatrist Banks begins seeing Emily, prescribing a series of ineffectual anti-depressants and consulting with Emily’s previous doctor, Victoria Siebert (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who suggestively says, “I think seeing a man will help her.” Banks’ interest in his new patient, complicated by suggestions both subtle and curious, raises the ire of Banks’ wife and the suspicions of the viewer.

Soderbergh’s best directorial instincts serve “Side Effects” in ways parallel to many of his recent titles, including “Contagion,” “Magic Mike,” and even “Haywire.” He never takes things too seriously, even when he is directing what is presumably drama. He never shows overt contempt for the characters – both decent and villainous – that work hard to attain their objectives. His sense of structure nearly always points toward a craftsman who values meticulous pacing and timing, and the division of “Side Effects,” marked by the surprise on-screen murder of an important character, echoes the gambit of “Psycho” with diabolical precision. Right in the middle of it all is Mara, effectively cast in the movie’s plummiest role. Is Emily unhinged or cagey? Both at once?

One does not even need to have read/seen “The Celluloid Closet” to recognize the “evil lesbian” rhetoric that (mis)informs characters in all kinds of films. Given Soderbergh’s tendency to mess with his audience, there is plenty of room for debate as to whether either Mara’s or Zeta-Jones’ characters are homosexual. Burns’ screenplay suggests the strong possibility that both women might be feigning same-sex attraction to manipulate the situation. Even so, this particular class of femme fatale stereotype, present in “Black Swan,” “Basic Instinct,” “Single White Female,” “Bound”  “Wild Things,” “Chloe,” and numerous others, may be the least imperative ruse in the movie’s playbook.

More fascinating than the sexual depravity and desperation is the movie’s incorporation of several classic bait-and-switch traps, including hidden recording devices, photo blackmail, double jeopardy escape plans, threats of electroshock, and one bizarre instance in which the reaction to a placebo is either a tour de force performance or an exhibition of the most disturbing psychopathy. The corporate drug industry milieu receives just the right dose of the filmmakers’ criticism, from the comical, bogus promotional Ablixa website (“Rare side effects may also include confusion…”) to the way in which the chemically altered state of the union attempts to solve every problem by developing a pill to pop.

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.