Movie review by Greg Carlson

Heart-on-its-sleeve earnest and desperate to be both taken seriously and embraced by the young people who helped put more than a million copies of the novel in print, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” aspires to the same kind of teen angst insider credibility owned by John Hughes in the 1980s. With David Bowie on the soundtrack and a cameo appearance by Joan Cusack, the movie pays Hughes respectful tribute during the course of its exploration of lunchroom caste systems, post-football game pot brownie parties, Rocky Horror performances, and heartfelt mixtape compilations.

Written and directed by “Wallflower” author Stephen Chbosky, the movie sticks close to the events described in troubled protagonist Charlie’s (Logan Lerman) letters to a “friend” in the book, dropping a subplot about an abortion and family scenes involving holidays spent with cousins. The author retains the core trio of thematic ballast: sexual abuse, the ugliness and consequences of homophobia, and (mostly) unrequited love. In “Slant,” Chris Cabin attacked the film as a “somewhat revolting piece of pop martyrdom, made for and isolated to the damaged middle class.” Cabin also detected “that certain, odious brand of liberalism that favors and tends toward victimization.” Given the movie’s milieu and ambitions, Cabin’s position may be a bit harsh.

The film remains virtually silent on the issue of class, but the characters clearly inhabit a world where attending college is a given (the movie version adds a thread of anxiety about Sam’s shaky application credentials). In the book, Charlie indicates that his family is not wealthy, and also that his grandfather is a racist, but the movie depicts the suburbs of Pittsburgh as a universe without much color. The same criticisms were often leveled at Hughes, causing one to wonder if teen films are somehow more glaring or noticeable in their homogeneity than romantic comedies, musicals, or thrillers.

As an epistolary novel, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” relies solely on Charlie’s descriptions of his friends and the members of his family. Obviously, a film adaptation requires actors to inhabit the characters, and the casting choices – particularly the principal trio of Charlie, crush object Sam, and Sam’s step-sibling Patrick – prove one of the film’s greatest strengths. Both Ezra Miller and Emma Watson break free of their best-known roles – he as sullen, deeply damaged kids in “Afterschool” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and she as Hermione Granger in the “Harry Potter” juggernaut. Both supporting players leave a mark, and Miller especially runs off with every scene in which he appears.

Not all of Chbosky’s decisions carry water, however, and I for one find it hard to believe that bright, artistic-minded, popular culture-obsessed teenagers of 1991 would not recognize or be able to figure out how to identify Bowie’s “Heroes,” which is used as the “mystery tunnel song” in bookend scenes. And while the movie’s pre-Internet setting precludes the possibility of iTunes and Google searches, Charlie’s affinity for the Smiths’ “Asleep,” along with the soundtrack inclusion of New Order, Sonic Youth, XTC, the Cocteau Twins, and Galaxy 500, among others, paints a picture of sharp musical taste.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A painfully unfunny movie that sticks to formula like Enfamil, “Pitch Perfect” has all the authenticity and verisimilitude of the Fiji mermaid. The sharp-eyed Anna Kendrick, taking a big step down from the quality of her recent roles, trades supporting status for a headlining turn, but her character displays no distinguishing features or personality traits. Kendrick’s Beca, a faux-rebellious wannabe music producer who reluctantly enrolls at the college where her father works, joins a competitive all-female a cappella group that can only exist in the cotton candy imagination of Hollywood. The members of the Bellas take a vow not to date any members of the all-male rival Treble Makers, but Beca falls for the handsome Jesse (Skylar Astin) faster than you can say “Romeo and Juliet.”

Building the structure of its narrative on the template popularized in low-stakes competition laffers like “Bring It On” and “Dodgeball,” “Pitch Perfect” even apes the former’s affinity for manufactured slang and the latter’s convention in which a pair of dysfunctional commentators banters through the performances, nattering away as if in some other, funnier film while carpet bombing their scenes with double entendre. John Michael Higgins, whose singing and arranging experience mark him as an obvious choice, and producer Elizabeth Banks, do the honors in the broadcast booth. Other than Kendrick, only Rebel Wilson escapes anonymity among the Bellas. Wilson continues her run as an indispensable generator of empathy in a society seemingly hell-bent on the ridicule of the overweight. As Fat Amy, Wilson walks off with every scene in which she appears.

Like “Glee,” “Pitch Perfect” depends on the razzle dazzle of its pop song choices, and only a handful of the tracks selected for vocal arrangement have cross-generational appeal. The movie crushes hard on John Hughes, returning several times to a motif revolving around “The Breakfast Club,” but director Jason Moore doesn’t hold a candle, let alone sixteen of them, to the legendary 80s auteur of angst. To win back the heart of her boy, Beca belts “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” but the thrill is blunted by an earlier scene in which the heroine weeps while watching Judd Nelson freeze mid-step with his fist raised in triumph. It’s never a good idea to include a clip reminding viewers of a much better film.

Given the bland, uninspired tone of “Pitch Perfect,” it is only a small surprise when Moore includes a scene in which Bella leader Aubrey (Anna Camp) empties the contents of her stomach all over the floor of the choir’s rehearsal space – a reprise of the embarrassing onset of nervousness that cost the singers a trophy during their last competition. The gushing fountain of vomit splatters and sprays everywhere, and Moore cannot resist adding additional gross-out gags, including a high-angle view of one of the Bellas slipping and falling in the foul, lumpy spew. The amateurish puking effects even fall short of the tube-in-the-sleeve technique beloved of “Saturday Night Live,” but the rancid disgorgement only serves to remind viewers that successful gross-out humor ala “Bridesmaids” is not easy to replicate.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

It goes without saying that many film students and wannabe auteurs will worship at the feet of “The Master,” another audacious, dazzling, and occasionally frustrating tour de force from the preternaturally gifted Paul Thomas Anderson. Highly anticipated as a potential expose itching to pull back the curtain on Scientology, the film functions instead as a rich character study of two particular types of American loser. The first is Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a misguided sailor in the U.S. Navy marking time in the South Pacific during the waning days of World War II. A deliberately unlikable alcoholic quick to outbursts of violence, Freddie is a self-taught mixologist, experimenting with paint thinner, photo processing chemicals, and any other available toxic substance that might give him a buzz.

Lost, angry, and very likely seriously mentally ill, Freddie blacks out and wakes up on a yacht commanded by Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-confident conman of the highest order who introduces himself by saying to Quell, “I am a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist, a theoretical philosopher, but above all, I am a man, just like you.” Dodd is enough like Charles Foster Kane that one would not have been surprised to hear him add newspaper publisher to the list of his achievements. To the chagrin of his family and inner-circle, Dodd falls hard for Freddie, inviting him to join the traveling circus Dodd calls “The Cause,” a cult-like system that blends fantasy, science, and sense memory with the power of suggestion in intense, therapeutic “processing” sessions, sometimes conducted one-on-one and sometimes played out in front of a roomful of spectators.

“The Master” most closely resembles Anderson’s own “There Will Be Blood,” both as portrait of outsize dreamers and as clinic on male screen performance. Amy Adams, as Dodd’s wife Peggy, is allowed but a fraction of the screen time devoted to the movie’s real romance between Freddie and Lancaster. If only PTA loved women as much as he loved men, Adams might have been given more moments like the fantastic scene in which she brings her husband to climax over a bathroom sink. Truly private, it is one of the few times in the film Anderson allows a glimpse of the Master without his shield, and suggests at least the possibility that the hand that rocks more than the cradle rules Dodd’s world.

“The Master” is by turns claustrophobic and panoramic, although the former outpaces the latter in scene after scene of intimate medium and close shots in which many speeches are given and “applications” are administered. The highly presentational nature of Dodd’s movement/religion incorporates and even demands that the Master’s every word be documented, a strategy that affords Anderson the luxury of non-stop grandstanding every time Lancaster opens his mouth – which is a great deal more than Freddie, who is often photographed in reaction, gazing at his mentor in wide-eyed awe.

The best moments in “The Master,” including the much-discussed barking mad jail scene, indicate that underneath his collected, controlled exterior Dodd is every bit as unhinged and fragile as Freddie. Jealous of Freddie’s unselfconsciousness, Dodd manipulates and abuses his friend, who masochistically takes everything dished out to him and comes back for more. By the time the Master croons the second of his two major musical performances, we may not understand much, but we will have seen that Lancaster contains within himself a riot only Quell can quell.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

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

The best scene in writer-director Rian Johnson’s “Looper” frames the profiles of Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Old Joe (Bruce Willis) in the booth of a small, mostly deserted diner. The two men are one and the same, and the face-to-face meeting knowingly flouts one of the longstanding paradoxes of time travel. The wheels of the plot insist that the Joes have incompatible tasks to accomplish, and even though the viewer hopes that the two appealing actors will spend significant screen time together, Johnson has other, equally ambitious ideas in mind for the second part of the movie.

That Joe would be at cross purposes with himself is one of Johnson’s smartest touches in a film bursting with promise. As a murder-for-hire trigger man carrying out dirty work for a future mobster who uses time travel to vacuum any trace of assassinations by having the killings done in an earlier decade, a “looper” like Joe belongs to the cinematic tradition of weary tough guys popularized in hardboiled detective noir. We are told (but can also certainly figure out) that these blunderbuss-wielding “gat men” are not a particularly optimistic class of outlaw. The very nature of their business insists on something Johnson calls “closing the loop,” which means pretty much what you think it does.

Johnson’s debut “Brick,” which also showcased the talents of Gordon-Levitt, remains the filmmaker’s strongest effort because it was less pedantic than “Looper” in its explorations of pain and loss. “Looper,” however, reaches for the cosmic territory of the very biggest questions of normative ethics, including the whopper conundrum that asks whether the murder of a particular child to spare the lives of many is a justifiable action. That wicked game dominates the last section of the film, and Johnson has it both ways by using Joe as the protector of the future killer known as the Rainmaker while Old Joe plots to pull the trigger on the little boy.

Johnson effectively constructs his own version of the so-called Hitler’s Murder Paradox, or at least the element of it in which we are asked whether a person should be held responsible for crimes that he or she has not yet committed. Sara (Emily Blunt), the maternal guardian of the child who may turn out to be the Rainmaker, believes that despite evidence to the contrary, the future is unwritten, and her point of view rejects predestination. To date, nobody has cinematically expressed the Hitler’s Murder Paradox and the unfathomable transformation from innocence to evil better than Elem Klimov in the apocalyptic masterpiece “Come and See.”

The resolution of “Looper,” a grand trope often described as the Heroic Suicide or Heroic Sacrifice, is Johnson’s answer to the problem. Despite being presented in the context of the film’s climax as a surprise, Joe’s death has been foretold and foreshadowed since the opening voiceover exposition, and will shock only those who were not paying much attention. Or those who have never seen “Alien 3,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” “Constantine,” “Gran Torino,” “Sunshine,” “Dancer in the Dark,” “Armageddon,” and “Sin City,” the latter two of which (perhaps coincidentally) afford Bruce Willis the opportunity to do himself in for a good reason.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A vast improvement over the weak 1995 adaptation by Danny Cannon, “Dredd” better understands the pulp sensibilities of the dystopian nightmare patrolled by Mega-City One Justice Department employee Joseph Dredd (Karl Urban), the grim, perpetually helmeted law officer whose authority as a judge fuels the fanboy power dream of immediate arrest, sentencing, and execution (when necessary, which is to say, very often). The suggestion that elevated future crime rates – the first Dredd story was set in 2099 – have necessitated a radical overhaul to the entire judicial system certainly won’t comfort those who identify as anti-authoritarian, but the comic book’s police state resides comfortably in a fantasy realm where the law represents a sane refuge from the hellish threat of drooling thugs.

Lame explanatory voiceover notwithstanding, director Pete Travis dispenses with most of the leaden exposition that weighs down so many movies aiming to please existing fan constituencies while simultaneously grubbing for new ticket buyers. Wisely, the audience is invited to identify with rookie Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), a mutant who can read the thoughts of others. Assigned to Dredd for a probationary evaluation, Anderson’s unique psychic abilities allow her to recognize nuance and complexity that contrasts sharply with Dredd’s rigid application of the rulebook. Cult screenwriter Alex Garland’s snapshot “day in the life” approach limits the principal conflict to one primary location, a concrete jungle housing project where Madeline “Ma-Ma” Madrigal (Lena Headey) conspires to consolidate the megalopolis’ trafficking of Slo-Mo, a crystal meth-like synthetic.

Action movie aficionados will no doubt recognize similarities between “Dredd” and “The Raid: Redemption,” the Indonesian martial arts thriller directed with panache by native Welshman Gareth Evans. Both movies revolve around the infiltration of high-rise slum blocks controlled by drug-dealing crime lords. Both movies feature showdowns in narcotics laboratories. Both movies include trapped law enforcement officers threatened by scores of bloodthirsty residents. Each movie treats violence with an obsessive degree of aesthetic care and concern.

Many of the film’s most unexpected surprises come courtesy of the impressive talent pool aiding Travis behind the camera. Frequent Lars von Trier and Danny Boyle collaborator Anthony Dod Mantle photographs the interiors of the Peach Trees block with a strong affinity for classic noir, and his collaboration with visual effects supervisor Jon Thum on a series of slow motion explorations of stomach-churning violence invests the visuals with a repulsive beauty. Grisly shots of bullets tearing through flesh and bone compete with low-angle, through-the-floor views of bodies plummeting to the pavement.

There is just enough gallows humor to keep “Dredd” from becoming overwhelmingly morose, and Garland thankfully holds the number of puns and one-liners to a minimum. The story’s chief deficiency is the handling of Ma-Ma. Headey is a wonderful actor, and Ma-Ma is presented as a shrewd opponent, but the best villains contain some element of humanity and Ma-Ma never lets down her guard as a ruthless tyrant. Wood Harris, as a gang lieutenant in the custody of Dredd and Anderson, has a better opportunity to develop a rounded character. A truly worthy Judge Dredd movie might explore the idea that the title character’s tendency to dispense blistering beatdowns is every bit as sadistic as the criminal behavior of the villains.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

With a mash-up premise that unites buddy movie, family drama, character study, and crime caper, “Robot & Frank” raises stakes higher by placing all of these ingredients inside the sci-fi trappings of its not-too-distant future setting. The movie marks the simultaneous feature narrative debut for former NYU classmates Christopher Ford, who wrote the screenplay, and Jake Schreier, who directed. The filmmakers are blessed to have Frank Langella as their protagonist, particularly because the juxtaposition of a forgetful senior citizen being scolded by a diminutive machine could so easily disintegrate into the pit of odd-couple ridiculousness.

Langella’s Frank is a one-time jewel thief and ex-con now moldering away in his modest rural retreat. Despite a lack of interest in housekeeping and grocery shopping, Frank regularly visits a local library to check out books and Jennifer (Susan Sarandon), the kind, sweet librarian dealing with impending repurposing of the facility following the community’s waning interest in physical media. A valuable copy of “Don Quixote” echoes Frank’s position as a chivalrous but antiquated conjurer of fanciful illusions, and Jennifer’s role as Frank’s Dulcinea will come to have bittersweet significance by the movie’s final scenes.

Frank’s robot, a gift from his impatient but concerned son Hunter (James Marsden), is programmed to assist with household chores and meal preparation, and to provide companionship and therapies designed to help with Frank’s cognitive deterioration. Designed by the creative minds at special effects firm Alterian (the veteran company known for Daft Punk’s helmets), physically performed by petite dancer Rachel Ma, and voiced by Peter Sarsgaard with an obvious affinity for Douglas Rain’s restrained sense of politeness and calm, the VGC-60L automaton makes a believable comic foil for the curmudgeonly Frank.

Many science fiction enthusiasts will appreciate the light touch of Ford and Schreier’s vision of things to come. Aside from a handful of subtle markers applied to automobiles, fashion, and communication devices, the film presents a familiar world similar to our own, and along with the aforementioned items, the presence of sophisticated robots provides evidence that the story is not unfolding in 2012. Frank’s daughter Madison (Liv Tyler), a globetrotting humanitarian, expresses strong displeasure at the thought of a robot in her father’s life, but by the time she arrives to complicate Frank’s plans, the robot has already been taught a great deal about casing potential targets, picking locks, and avoiding detection (one can only speculate whether training a mechanical caretaker to steal imperils the Three Laws of Robotics).

More than one critic has bemoaned the film’s apparent lack of interest in the philosophical explorations of humanness at the heart of works like “Blade Runner,” but “Robot & Frank” effectively addresses the topic by establishing a parallel between Frank’s dementia and a plot development in which the total erasure of the robot’s memory will provide a solution to a significant problem. By the time this dilemma materializes, Frank has come to value the friendship provided by the robot, and the possible destruction of his companion’s “brain function” reminds the old man of his own fragile mental state.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A maddening exercise in self-seriousness, “The Words” might find future success in basic screenwriting courses as an example of script structures to be avoided. Of course, that notion assumes the movie will be remembered at all. The film’s story, about a writer creating a story about a writer who steals his story from another writer, is constructed from a series of vignettes presented too often as a set of nested visualizations of the written word intended to carry a great deal of disquieting significance. The presence of Jeremy Irons, credited as “The Old Man” in one of the movie’s many misguided allusions to Ernest Hemingway, only exacerbates the film’s problematic division of its narrative strands.

Groaning under the weight of its unsustainable Hemingway crush, the post-World War II flashbacks to Paris are described in detail by the Old Man to word thief Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), even though large segments of the narrated information would have already been included in the appropriated manuscript familiar to Rory and thus rendering redundant the Old Man’s ponderous retelling. Co-screenwriters and co-directors Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal show a great deal less interest in Rory’s motivations for passing off another’s work as his own, setting the stage for an inevitable confession to Rory’s wife Dora (Zoe Saldana suffering the indignity of a ghostly role).

As soon as Dennis Quaid’s established novelist Clayton Hammond attracts the attention of aggressive grad student Daniella (Olivia Wilde) during a public reading of his work, viewers are fooled into believing that the presence of the curious young woman will result in satisfying revelations. Otherwise, what is the point of constructing the flirtatious framing device scenes between these strangers? The filmmakers predictably allude to the possibility that Hammond is the inspiration and model for Rory Jansen, but stop short of confirming the connection.

Bradley Cooper features on the film’s one-sheet, even though the character he plays is a figment of Hammond’s and/or Daniella’s imagination. Cooper receives more than his share of insulting critiques claiming that his physical appeal precludes any real capacity for acting talent (not unlike barbs aimed at Brad Pitt at least as far back as 1992’s “A River Runs Through It”). “The Words” doesn’t help the handsome star’s case, but if the buzz proves correct, negative attitudes about Cooper may change with the upcoming release of David O. Russell’s “Silver Linings Playbook.”

Considering the number of plagiarism cases that have made headlines in recent years, “The Words” might have been improved by focusing on the details of Rory’s deception from his point of no return (when he lies to his adoring wife’s face) through the decision of his sleazy, unscrupulous editor to maintain the public illusion that Rory has written a great book. Instead, the filmmakers spend far too much time inside the Old Man’s memories. These scenes are especially vexing, since so much of their drama is recounted in verbal description instead of through the performances of the actors playing the younger versions of Irons’ character and his wife. The tragedy suffered by these new parents, yet another Hemingway nod, leads to the future Old Man’s cathartic composition. When Irons growls over the pounding score, “The words simply poured out of him,” viewers will wonder why a movie about literary inspiration is so uninspired.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A violent, pulpy, Prohibition-era slugfest, “Lawless” adapts Matt Bondurant’s historical novel “The Wettest County in the World,” a yarn based on the adventures of the author’s bootlegger grandfather and two great uncles. Loosely interpreting the events of the so-called Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy, the Virginia-set melodrama capitalizes on the sacred tropes of the gangster genre without matching the transcendence or grandeur of top-shelf examples like “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Godfather” and “Miller’s Crossing.” Showcasing the talents of an impressive roster of past, present, and future award contenders, “Lawless” pins its hopes primarily on narrator and youngest Bondurant Shia LaBeouf  – a risky strategy when Tom Hardy and Jessica Chastain are around.

“Lawless” reunites director John Hillcoat with several key members of the filmmaking team that produced “The Proposition,” including screenwriter and composer Nick Cave, composer Warren Ellis, cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, and actors Guy Pearce and Noah Taylor. Fans of that terrific 2005 film will notice many thematic and stylistic similarities between the Austrialian Western and “Lawless,” the most pronounced of which is a grim fascination with brutal, even gruesome mayhem. Both films also deal with the family ties of trios of brothers bound by blood but threatened by impulsiveness.

Screenwriter Nick Cave’s treatment of Old Testament themes admirably strives to weave streaks of black humor and period color with the high-stakes warfare that erupts when the Bondurants refuse to roll over for the outsider lawmen who want too fat a cut of their lucrative moonshine operation. A great deal of care is taken in the visual and sound design of altercations in which brass knuckles crack and slit throats gurgle. If he’s not meting out spectacular punishment, Hardy’s Forrest Bondurant is tough enough to withstand any physical threat cooked up by Special Agent Charlie Rakes, Pearce’s fussy, lethal dandy. The two actors are a study in opposites, although both turns are mannered. Pearce vamps as the twisty, vain, sadist while Hardy relies on grunts.

The two principal female characters in “Lawless” fare largely as expected in a universe , defined by the savagery of gunslingers. Both Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska do the most with the least, in spite of their function as romantic partners for men whose interests drive the action. Chastain, following up a year of performances that brought seemingly instant stardom and critical acclaim, embraces her abused showgirl-with-a-heart-of-gold to share an erotic charge previously hidden. Wasikowska, whose apparent off-screen indifference to the antics of LaBeouf inspired her co-star to spin publicity around his drunken behavior, has the task of making us believe her serious-minded preacher’s daughter would buy what LaBeouf’s callow braggart is peddling.

The most significant deficit of “Lawless” emerges via the narrative’s multiple, fractured arcs. Juggling its large cast of key players, the focus on LaBeouf’s untested, wide-eyed striver gobbles up attention that might be more satisfyingly focused on the relationship between Hardy’s Forrest and Chastain’s Maggie, which unfolds at the diner the Bondurant’s use as home base (an intriguing and underutilized setting). Other fascinating characters populate the margins, including Gary Oldman’s colorful big city machine gunner Floyd Banner, but his cameo, dispatched with the villainous verve of several of the actor’s vintage turns, leaves the viewer wanting a great deal more than the filmmakers can offer.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Lower your expectations and David Koepp’s “Premium Rush” entertains as late summer junior varsity Hitchcock. The increasingly appealing Joseph Gordon-Levitt commits far more than is necessary to his role as daredevil, fixed gear, no brakes courier Wilee, the innocent man caught up in a dangerous cat-and-mouse chase with a crooked gambler and NYPD detective played by creep specialist Michael Shannon. Flirting with near real-time action (interrupted by some unnecessary juggling of chronology to provide surprises and critical information to the audience), “Premium Rush” constructs its suspense around the perfect bike messenger MacGuffin: a highly valuable package desired by good guys and bad guys alike that must reach a destination by a particular hour.

The screenplay, by Koepp and John Kamps, wisely focuses most of the attention on the lightning-quick decisions and split-second reactions of Wilee on two wheels as he races around densely populated and dangerous thoroughfares. Whenever the film slows down to elucidate character motivation or complicate the plot, the chain comes off. A distracting love triangle involving Wilee’s ex – fellow messenger Vanessa (Dania Ramirez) – and another courier, Manny (Wole Parks), suffers from clumsy integration and a baffling lack of logic. At one point, a simple phone call from Vanessa to Manny could have saved a heap of trouble. The presence of a bicycle cop continually thwarted by Wilee’s pedal skill is played for comic relief, but the movie never settles on a tone that feels right, careening from cartoon gags to brutal violence.

Given Koepp’s reputation as a writer, “Premium Rush” is littered with too much empty-headed filler and too many bone-headed plays, including a silly tavern flashback that rehashes Manny’s jealousy over Wilee and Vanessa’s connection, a bizarre decision in which the previously dedicated Wilee returns the envelope after he’s in too deep to change his mind, an impound lot switcheroo, and the head-scratching nature of the relationship between Vanessa and her imperiled roomie Nima (Jamie Chung), whose troubles are revealed in a tidal wave of mawkish and manipulative sentimentality involving the illegal immigration of an adorable child.

New York dwellers can argue about the extent to which Koepp’s understanding of Manhattan geography hews to realistic time frames (the Post’s Kyle Smith scoffs at the film’s ticking clock, arguing that the envelope could have been more efficiently taken by subway in the span allotted). For a majority of viewers, however, the movie’s bird’s eye view graphics mapping out routes will add a welcome dimension to the street level stunts. Publicity for “Premium Rush” has emphasized the production’s commitment to real riding (an end credit video of Gordon-Levitt following a nasty crash that required more than two-dozen stitches is better than most of the feature). The movie’s smartest visual effects, imaginative flash-forwards similar to the idea used in Tom Tykwer’s “Run Lola Run,” show sets of potential outcomes whenever Wilee cuts it too close for comfort.

The culmination of the action in “Premium Rush” flubs the expectations of a good chase, placing the protagonist in the back of an ambulance instead of ramping up the adrenaline. Wilee’s close quarters confrontation with Shannon’s dirty officer might consciously or subconsciously pay tribute to the showdown between James Stewart’s hobbled Jeff and Raymond Burr’s nothing-left-to-lose Thorwald at the end of “Rear Window,” but unlike the Hitchcock masterpiece, “Premium Rush” will most likely take its place in cinema history alongside “Quicksilver.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

An optimistic, opposites-attract bromance polished to the kind of high-gloss sheen perfected by and valued in Hollywood, French box office smash “The Intouchables” defies viewers to resist its charming fantasy exploring the relationship between a fabulously wealthy white quadriplegic and the streetwise black immigrant hired to provide around-the-clock personal care. Based on Abdel Sellou’s non-fiction account “You Changed My Life,” the adaptation alters the ethnicity of the assistant from Algerian to Senegalese, a change that has been noted by critics who defend as well as critics who denounce the portrayal of the camaraderie between the movie’s principal odd couple, Driss (played by Omar Sy, the first black actor to be awarded a Cesar) and Phillippe (played by Francois Cluzet).

Several prominent film reviewers including David Denby have accused “The Intouchables” of reinforcing racial stereotypes, and the movie does not shy away from the well-worn thematic construction in which an attuned but economically impoverished or working class black man guides a wealthy white grouch to an understanding of fuller personhood (as in “Driving Miss Daisy” and “The Bucket List”). Writing for “Slate,” Daphnee Denis defends the film against the charges of racism, developing an argument that insists French audiences see past the master/servant relationship and the old cliches. Denis additionally observes that “The Intouchables” operates as a political allegory, concluding her essay with the statement, “White France is paralyzed; immigrant France has become its arms and legs,” a thought that gives the film an awful lot of credit.

“The Intouchables” is filtered through the experiences of Driss, a strategy that allows the filmmakers a premium opportunity to present the protagonist’s wonderment at his employer’s vast wealth as automobile/clothing/real estate porn that can be simultaneously ogled by the filmgoer. Although it may have made for a much stronger and more balanced view of the class disparities between Phillippe and Driss, we spend as little time as possible inside the crowded, lower class neighborhood that Driss escapes in favor of his new boss’s opulent, gated mansion. Directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano mirror a shot of Driss folded into his cramped shower with one in which he luxuriates in the massive private bath provided as part of his employment. The juxtaposition is as obvious as the contrast between Phillippe’s interest in opera and Driss’s passion for the R&B sound of Earth, Wind & Fire.

The chemistry between Sy and Cluzet is terrific, which alleviates any resentment the ninety-nine percent may have when peeking in on the world of a man who can spend the annual salary of a middle class professional on a single painting. The filmmakers insist that we thrill to Driss’s literal escape into a reality that puts him behind that wheel of a Maserati Quattroporte and outfits him in a hand-tailored suit. The tactic nearly succeeds, although a half-hearted subplot concerning Driss’s family occasionally pops up to remind everyone what’s at stake. “The Intouchables” is easily and accurately described as a “feel good” movie, and more often than not, it reinforces the idea that it’s much better to have the problems of a rich person than the ones experienced by the poor.