Into the Wild (2007)
DIRECTOR: Sean Penn
CAST: Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Brian Dierker, Vince Vaughn, Kristen Stewart, Hal Holbrook
REVIEW:
The life of Christopher McCandless provokes some of the same emotions as that of Timothy Treadwell, chronicled in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, both romantic, naive—some would say foolish—idealists who died as they lived, in the wilderness, and who depending on who you ask are either admirable figures or recklessly committing inadvertent suicide (or a little of both). Adapting from Jon Krakauer’s book, itself a combination of first-hand written fragments from McCandless’ own diary and a compilation of second-hand accounts from those whose lives he drifted in and out of along the way, actor-director Sean Penn in his fourth outing behind the camera has brought McCandless’ story to the screen in docudrama fashion interweaving two genres: the road trip, and man versus nature. Continue reading
Zodiac (2007)
DIRECTOR: David Fincher
CAST: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Anthony Edwards, Chloe Sevigny, Brian Cox, Elias Koteas, Dermot Mulroney, Philip Baker Hall, John Carroll Lynch
REVIEW:
While it tells the true unsolved story of one of America’s most notorious serial killers–at least that which is publicly known–Zodiac is not a thriller, at least not in a conventional sense. Rather, it’s a police procedural and docudrama. Based on a true crime book by Robert Graysmith, it puts the focus not on Zodiac himself, who remains a shadowy, elusive, nameless and faceless figure (although the movie’s viewpoint, like Graysmith’s, is blatantly slanted toward one suspect), but on the men (including Graysmith himself) who were involved in the long-running, ultimately fruitless manhunt. To this end, Zodiac is a bit like a souped-up, two-and-a-half hour episode of Law & Order, and will appeal to some of the same audience fascinated by the details of police procedure and investigating. It depicts the above with slick polish and is often intriguing, but an uneven pace and the inevitable open ending will frustrate some viewers not strongly interested in the subject matter. Continue reading
The Queen (2006)
DIRECTOR: Stephen Frears
CAST: Helen Mirren, Michael Sheen, James Cromwell, Helen McCrory, Alex Jennings, Roger Allam, Sylvia Syms
REVIEW:
With The Queen, director Stephen Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan set out with several agendas: humanize the British monarch while at the same time critiquing the out-of-touch isolation of the royal family, and chronicle in docudrama fashion the key time period in the immediate aftermath of Princess Diana’s death, and the fledgling relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and newly-elected Prime Minister Tony Blair. It has succeeded on all fronts, turning what could potentially have been a dry, stuffy, talky affair into a fascinating and compelling drama and character study. One needn’t be a royal family aficionado (though of course that helps) to find The Queen engaging viewing.
Continue readingDer Untergang/The Downfall (2004)
DIRECTOR: Oliver Hirschbiegel
CAST:
Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Corinna Harfouch, Juliane Köhler, Ulrich Matthes, Thomas Kretschmann, Christian Berkel, Matthias Habich, Heino Ferch, Michael Mendl, André Hennicke, Ulrich Noethen, Doneven Gunia, Thomas Thieme
REVIEW:
The third major film depiction of the last days of Adolf Hitler (following 1973’s Hitler: The Last Ten Days, starring Alec Guinness, and 1981’s The Bunker, starring Anthony Hopkins) but the first internationally-released German production to feature Hitler as a main character, Downfall is director Oliver Hirschbiegel and screenwriter Bernd Eichinger’s frank confrontation of a man and legacy that has stigmatized and haunted Germany for sixty years. Continue reading
Alexander (2004)
DIRECTOR: Oliver Stone
CAST:
Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Val Kilmer, Jared Leto, Rosario Dawson, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, John Kavanagh, Brian Blessed
REVIEW:
Best-known for controversial, politically-charged fare like Natural Born Killers, JFK, and Nixon, Oliver Stone’s latest venture, the epically-mounted but narratively disjointed historical drama Alexander, is more cinematically straightforward than his previous efforts but unfortunately lacks the focus and drive to maintain consistent interest throughout its three-hour running time. Continue reading
K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
DIRECTOR: Kathryn Bigelow
CAST: Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Peter Sarsgaard, Donald Sumpter, Ravil Isyanov, Christian Camargo, John Shrapnel, Joss Ackland
REVIEW:
WARNING: THIS REVIEW WILL REVEAL ASPECTS OF THE FILM’S PLOT
Following in the vein of such films as Das Boot and Crimson Tide, K-19: The Widowmaker is a thriller with an epic backdrop of historical conflict unfolding within the claustrophobic confines of a submarine. Kathryn Bigelow’s entry in the submarine genre doesn’t rewrite the book on anything—in fact, at times it’s cobbled together out of cliches, despite being based on an actual incident—but it’s well-made and engaging, and hits the expected points effectively. Continue reading
We Were Soldiers (2002)
DIRECTOR: Randall Wallace
CAST: Mel Gibson, Sam Elliott, Madeleine Stowe, Greg Kinnear, Barry Pepper, Chris Klein, Keri Russell, Ryan Hurst, Don Duong
REVIEW:
From writer-director Randall Wallace (writer of Braveheart and Pearl Harbor) comes this intense and powerful Vietnam war film covering the previously relatively obscure Battle of the Le Drang Valley—-not inappropriately known as the Valley of Death—-in November 1965, in which Americans and North Vietnamese met each other in major combat for the first time, with 300 men of the Seventh Cavalry under Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore desperately holding their surrounded position against wave after wave of a total of 4,000 North Vietnamese troops.
Continue readingConspiracy (2001)
DIRECTOR: Frank Pierson
CAST: Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth, Ian McNeice, Kevin McNally, David Threlfall, Ewan Stewart, Brian Pettifer, Nicholas Woodeson, Jonathan Coy, Brendan Coyle, Ben Daniels, Barnaby Kay, Owen Teale, Peter Sullivan
REVIEW:
This Made-For-TV HBO original movie, based on the sole surviving copy of the transcript of the infamous Wannsee Conference, will likely be found “boring” by those without an interest in the historical subject matter—after all, at least on the surface, it consists of nothing but fifteen men sitting around a table talking—but for those with an interest, Conspiracy is a disturbing docudrama that embodies the phrase “the banality of evil”. Continue reading
Elizabeth (1998)
DIRECTOR: Shekhar Kapur
CAST: Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, Joseph Fiennes, Richard Attenborough, Christopher Eccleston
REVIEW:
The reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England began in 1558, when at the age of twenty-five, she succeeded her half-sister Mary I. Over the course of the next forty-five years, she ushered in the so-called Golden Age and became one of the longest-reigning and most popular and successful monarchs ever to sit on the British throne. Director Shekhar Kapur’s lavish period costume drama Elizabeth, however, focuses on the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, when the young queen was surrounded by enemies and plagued with uncertainty, and facing the prospect of losing her throne—and her life—so soon after taking it.
Continue readingThe Ghost and the Darkness (1996)
DIRECTOR: Stephen Hopkins
CAST: Michael Douglas, Val Kilmer, John Kani, Brian McCardie, Bernard Hill, Om Puri, Tom Wilkinson, Emily Mortimer
REVIEW:
The Ghost and the Darkness is obviously an attempt to do for the African tall grass what Jaws did for the water, with two lions in place of a great white shark, but it falls far short of Jaws’ classic status for a few reasons. One, director Stephen Hopkins is no Steven Spielberg. Two, Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer are not playing characters nearly as well-delineated as those played by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw. Prolific author and screenwriter William Goldman (who’s written titles as diverse as The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, All the President’s Men, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) does not churn out one of his stronger works. As an example of the general level of subtlety, the big game hunter is named Remington, and it’s the kind of movie where people say painfully earnest wannabe profundities like “you build bridges. You have to go where the rivers are”. Continue reading