The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

Wes Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, has bowed to reviews that link the occasionally staggering scale of its production design to the director’s meticulously ordered stop-motion film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Certainly the two stand as the most thoroughly crafted works in the oeuvre of a man whose trademark is his fussy attention to detail; in The Grand Budapest Hotel, hotel lobbies, prisons, even Alpine monasteries are created in such lavishly minute precision that the logistics of each impeccably straightened sign, every spotless carpet threaten to divert all attention away from the narrative at hand. In execution, however, the film belongs more with its immediate predecessor, Moonrise Kingdom, as both an unmistakable continuation of its maker’s singular style and an increasingly sophisticated breakdown of it.

From a narrative standpoint, no Wes Anderson film has ever been this convoluted. Typically, the director’s films spend more time merely introducing the characters and their strictly regimented habits than they do detailing what those people get up to. That is not to say that there is not conflict or drive in Anderson’s movies, but that said conflict typically arises from the intrusion of reality and lived, experienced wisdom upon the myopic headspace of stunted wunderkinder, a forceful denial and eventual acceptance of how ignorant these self-perceived geniuses truly are. But The Grand Budapest Hotel is the first of Anderson’s films in which the outside sources of awakening do not come as a natural course of maturation but from the direct imposition of actively hostile forces. Set primarily during WWII, the film presents a series of nested narratives involving characters whose pluck, intelligence and wit is slowly revealed to be utterly inadequate a defense against forces hellbent on eradicating the old way of things. Anderson routinely presents a sense of style and fashion far removed from the present; The Grand Budapest Hotel hones in on the last moment such modes were considered contemporary and proper before being violently stomped out.

Capsule Reviews: Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, Skyfall, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, 2012)

Anticipating the ire of their many detractors, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim build their feature-length Billion Dollar Movie on a joke that plays on them inexplicably receiving money from major corporate interests to do their thing in the mainstream. The creative duo's audacity has often eclipsed the actual content of their 11-minute episodes on Adult Swim, making the prospect of a 95-minute feature daunting. Surprise, surprise, this is amazingly focused, with something approaching a plot and everything. Because a relatively stable foundation grounds the film, Tim and Eric's usual diversions manage to pack more punch for letting the nuances of their weirdness shine through. Every technical hiccup, awkward insert shot and flat line of dialogue delivered just a second too late creates a sense of discomfort like a low-frequency sound. I cannot explain why I find that effect hilarious, but then, the sight of John C. Reilly hacking up a lung as a Dickensian, wolf-raised orphan or Ray Wise presiding over a grotesque sort of body cleanse need no justification. Grade: B-

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (David Yates, 2011)

[I guess I should issue a spoiler warning for this review, but honestly, if you've neither read the book nor seen the movie yet are still reading reviews hoping not to be spoiled, what the hell is wrong with you?]

Viewed as a referendum on the Harry Potter film franchise (to say nothing of my childhood), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 is bound to fail. With precious few exceptions, this series has favored exposition over organic growth, deflated climaxes and spotty special effects, and at times this franchise has been so lifeless that Britain's talent pool has been drained to give these films any weight at all. Numerous critics and admirers have remarked upon the franchise's consistency given the number of editors and directors that have taken on the material, but I think that is something of a detriment. Regardless of who's made these films, the studio has made sure that nothing, not even Alfonso Cuaron's "none more black" mise-en-scène, has rocked the boat. Hiring David Yates, a workman whose primary skill has been putting exposed film into cans, seemed the final push to make these movies as crowd-pleasingly safe as possible.

And yet, Deathly Hallows Part 2, like its predecessor, shows Yates not overcoming his flaws but offsetting them with narrow but powerful strengths. The final installment in this film franchise suffers the same overarching, aforementioned issues that plague all these films, and it also suffers from the convolution, calculated audience appeasement and rush-job pacing of Rowling's written conclusion. Yet for once, I can confidently say that few, if any, of the film's major flaws can truly be traced back to Yates, while a great deal of its moments of pure atmosphere and character are specifically the result of his hand.

Steven Spielberg: Schindler's List

Perhaps the greatest argument for the sincerity and dedication Steven Spielberg put into Schindler's List is how radical a departure it was for the artist. Spielberg's Holocaust drama was by no means his first serious drama, but it is the first to be largely void of his more flamboyant framing and movement. Spielberg had previously shown a keen ability to cut and frame in such a way as to maximize audience impact, but here he needed them to do more than just be entertained or sympathize with characters. Gravity and respect are required here, and Spielberg wrestles with crafting a working mainstream film without his usual stylistic élan.

Ingeniously, he finds ways to maintain his usual level of craftsmanship while employing unfamiliar techniques. Schindler's List is more static than any of Spielberg's other works, and the camera movement that feels so liberating in his other movies connotes dread here. Whenever the camera starts to track, practically nothing good will come of it, and one fears the movement because it will only display more atrocity, more terror.

Fundamentally, the movie is an indirect conflict between two principal characters, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) and Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), and Spielberg structures much of the movie as a call and response between them. Perhaps it speaks to the director's limitations that he condenses the Holocaust to a more conventional dramatic structure, but I never really believed the film was "about" the Holocaust anyway. Instead, it concerns the human reaction of those mired in it, not seeking to explicate the motives or moral justifications of the greatest of human failings but demonstrating how some reacted to it. In the case of Goeth, it brought out the worst; for Schindler, the best.

Spielberg introduces the two, though far apart, in similar manners. He does not show them directly, letting us see another person speaking to them until the camera finally reels around to present them. We first see Schindler through close-ups of his material effects, pristine formal wear and wads of cash casually crammed all over the place. We then see an extreme close-up of the man placing a Nazi pin on his business suit, suggesting that the fascist regime is something he wears over his real identity as a money-maker and never thinks twice about. Sure enough, when he arrives at a restaurant to meet with the head of the SS in Kraków, Scherner (Andrzej Seweryn), Schindler flashes that cash to make himself known: he has come to Poland to profit from the war, and getting approval for his business ventures will require greasing some wheels, preferably with Hennessy cognac or Dom Perignon. Sure enough, he soon has a factory up and running, which he populates with Jewish workers because they cost less than anyone else.


When Goeth appears, however, he is in the opposite shape as proud, hale Schindler, hunched over with a handkerchief ever-present at his face as he sniffles. Bent over, Fiennes looks even less impressive than the lumbering Neeson. Where Schindler's initial dealings with Jews display only his money-hungry scheming, Goeth almost seems sympathetic to the Jews. He looks tenderly upon a shivering woman, Helen Hirsch, and his sickly frame makes him pitiable. Then, a Jewish engineer tells him she needs to re-pour the foundations, he calmly has her shot for delaying proceedings, even as he agrees with her assessment and orders his men to fix the problem after having her executed. In an instant, Goeth is revealed to be a tyrant, a man who has internalized the anti-Semitic preachings of the party because it feeds into his desire for power.

His entrance demonstrates how far Schindler has progressed without any outward signs of a change of heart. At the start of the film, Oskar decides to use Jewish labor because it costs less than paying Poles. Furthermore, Jewish wages go to the SS, which allows Schindler to perhaps save a bit of bribe money by sending one monthly payment out instead of two. He tells his accountant, Stern (Ben Kingsley), to round up some Jews whose money is about to be seized anyway to invest in his factory in exchange for the pots and pans his enamel-work factory will produce. "Money is still money," says one Jewish man in disbelief of the insult of this offer. "No it is not," Schindler calmly replies. "That is why we are here." As Stern starts to use the factory to house the intellectual and infirm from harm, Schindler starts to wonder why such under-qualified people work for him. When a one-armed man, who earlier thanked a disinterested Schindler profusely for saving him, gets shot callously by German soldiers for sport, Oskar's complaints to the commander communicate only his annoyance at having to train a new worker.

But Goeth brings with him the full force of antisemitic terror, and not even Schindler can blind himself to his atrocity. In the film's defining setpiece, Goeth leads troops through the Krakow ghetto, killing all who resist or cannot leave and shipping the rest to camps. On a hilltop outside of town, Schindler and his wife watch, and the look on Oskar's face shows the man unable to hold back the fleeting hints of compassion in his unwillingness to expose Stern's account manipulations and his attempts to keep his workers alive.


How could anyone not be moved while watching such sights? Nazis yank suitcases out of the hands of fleeing Jews, pouring out contents into massive piles of loot as more and more corpses fall around the stacks of clothes. The Krakow sequence shows Spielberg at the height of his formalist powers, intricate tracking shots capturing the horror in ethereal detail, highlighting how otherworldly this atrocity is but adding enough grisly close-ups to tie that detached disgust to raw, real feeling. Few escape the pillage: one of Schindler's Jews stops and clears suitcases from the road when Goeth and his men come upon him, avoiding death. A young German boy tasked with alerting soldiers to any strays comes across an old woman but recognizes her as a friend's mom and hides her. These moments provide not relief but terrifying moments of suspense; the slow, relieved exhale never comes because too much carnage continues around these glimpses of fortune to make them relaxing.

The event transforms Oskar, who taps into his latent humanism and resolves to protect those under his stead. Oskar butters up Goeth just as he does every other authority figure, but by this point he displays a care for his employees. He maintains his concern extends only to protecting himself from the cost of training new workers, that by killing his Jews or sending them to camps. Goeth argues Schindler's points but finally agrees, on the condition Oskar pay a bribe for each worker. Schindler, once so obsessed with money, goes deep into debt to protect his people.

Goeth, otherwise an embodiment of merciless antisemitism, accepts his friend's money, revealing the true motivators among men even during these times. Money trumps ingrained social brainwashing, even direct orders of Herr Hitler. Sex, too, clouds the mind. Both Schindler and Goeth take Jewish mistresses, but where Schindler freely enjoys the perks of wealth, Goeth wrestles viciously with his belief system and his clear affection for Helena (Embeth Davidtz), who brings out a repugnant sexual aggression in the monster. When Goeth looks upon her, the longing in Fiennes' eyes brings out the humanity in this devil. He thinks of life with her, even hinting to Oskar that he'd like to take her back to Vienna. But she is still a Jew, and Amon's crisis finds its outlet in blaming Helena for tempting him. Highlighting Goeth's turmoil over his antisemitism and Oskar's increasing fondness for his Jewish workers is a sequence juxtaposing Goeth sadistically beating a stripped-down Helena in a wine cellar with Schindler celebrating his birthday by enjoying too lingering a kiss with a Jewish woman in his factory. (In a moment of grim irony, Schindler goes to jail for this offense while Goeth does not even face questions for his behavior, yet Goeth successfully pressures his superiors to release his friend.)

Much of Schindler's List carries this mordant gallows humor, perhaps a reason for some of the backlash that eventually assailed the film's reputation. One scene shows a rabbi in Schindler's factory caught out slacking on the job by Goeth himself, who drags the man outside for swift execution. Amon forces the man to his knees, pulls out a Lüger, presses it to the man's skull and...click. The gun jams. Goeth tries again, and nothing. At last, he becomes so enraged he beats the rabbi with the butt of the pistol and leaves in a huff with the man alive. Elsewhere, he succeeds in murdering without compunction, and his lazy Sunday sniping of stray Jews in the camp from his villa's balcony takes on an absurdist element.


Yet Spielberg never plays up this repellent, twisted brand of comedy, instead using it to achieve an emotional verisimilitude. I distrust any film depicting atrocity that omits those air-sucking inverse laughs that offer just enough energy to keep people moving in the face of death. Despite the verité style of some handheld shots, Schindler's List does not attempt to present its images as documentary truth. The director's tracking shots are more graceful than they'd ever been, and his use of constant juxtaposition removes the camera from fully capturing How It Really Was. Instead, Spielberg seeks a spiritual truth, and that humor is but one way in which he makes the film feel real.

Bolstering the film further is a sense of moral complexity previously unseen in Spielberg's filmography save for Empire of the Sun (which actually handled it with more subtlety). We meet Schindler as a villain, someone who gleefully exploits the Jews' situation for personal gain and reacts to their gratitude as if he just realized he'd stepped in dog muck. Though he does not subscribe to Nazi ideology, he is more than willing to go along with it if he can make a buck or two. Goeth, on the other hand, enters the film almost sympathetically, his weak, distended frame -- Fiennes made a fascinating choice to lean his thin stomach out until it formed a paunch, making Goeth misshapen -- hinting at a softer, bookish soul. Then we see him morph into a tyrant, but even then Spielberg does not cheapen him with two-dimensional atrocity. His Goeth struggles as much, if not more, with his conscience as Schindler. The aforementioned tryst with Helena adds layers to a man most would be happy to relegate to the pile of History's Greatest Monsters (and not at all without reason), and it demonstrates a maturity on Spielberg's part willfully ignored by those who tore the film apart after its release.

No film in Spielberg's corpus is as fiercely debated as Schindler's List, because none of his other films carries such hefty stakes. Less than two decades after its release, Spielberg's Holocaust drama has become the focal point for nearly any discussion about the propriety of Hollywood making large-scale films about real human tragedies. To this day, contentious arguments arise over the nature to which Spielberg "glamorizes" the Holocaust, which is not to say that he makes it appealing but that he exploits the horror of the event to mine audience reaction.

But let us consider a few of the most debated moments of the film. In the most infamous sequence, the train carrying all the women and children from Schindler's factory in Krakow gets rerouted from his new munitions factory to nearby Auschwitz. When they arrive, guards strip them and send them into showers, where the women shriek in fear of expected death. The terror is unlike anything I've ever felt during a movie, and I continue to seize up at the scene. Then, water flows from the outlets, and the exploding wave of relief and restarting hearts rolls right out of the frame into the theater or living room.

Some accuse Spielberg of manipulating an audience with this moment, but I can never agree. Is any emotion beyond reverent disgust inappropriate? Is it wrong to try to capture what it must have felt like in those seconds of pure fear? Frankly, the only way I can see Spielberg honoring the solemn tone of this kind of film would be to have actually sent those women to their deaths as he lingered outside the chamber, but which of these two scenarios sounds crueler to you? Besides, Spielberg does give the audience a taste of the latter when the women emerge from the showers hugging and crying in joy as, behind them, a single file of Jews enter another chamber that does not hold water in its pipes, and the camera tilts up to show black ash billowing from the building.

At the other end of the supposed emotional manipulation spectrum are the tear-jerking moments. At the end of the film, Schindler, nearly broke but with just enough money to escape the country in advance of the Red Army's breach of the camp and the inevitable shooting first and asking later, stands with his workers gathered around him. More than 1,000 men, women and children assemble, capable of doing so because Schindler and Stern saved their lives. But instead of feeling proud or relieved, Schindler breaks down and sobs, wracked with guilt for the millions he couldn't help. He rips off what trinkets remain his and wonders how many lives he could have saved with each. Even his lapel pin might have worked as a bribe to save one more person. Perhaps it's a maudlin moment, but who could feel satisfied in this situation. Spielberg's film might show the goodness of humanity even in its darkest hour, but he is not so childish as to think one man's actions, despite the Hebrew proverb Stern recites to him ("He who saves one life saves the world entire"), can undo all the pain. But for those he saved, Schindler truly did save their whole world.

I find it somewhat amusing that scenes such as the one just mentioned provide ammunition for the film's detractors. Spielberg, who founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (now the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education) with some of the profits of the film and continues to finance that foundation, has been accused far more often of exploitation and profiteering than Claude Lanzmann, maker of the astonishing, vital and deliberately non-conclusive documentary Shoah.

That film is deservedly lauded, but it is also held up as the answer to Schindler's List by some critics who fail to acknowledge that the methods Lanzmann used to elicit information from both the perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust breached nearly every ethical boundary in the book. He broke the rules not for money but to get the story, but do people really think Spielberg just wanted the cash or a gold-plated statuette? Spielberg wanted a story as much as Lanzmann did, and I find faults and quibbles with Spielberg's otherwise admirable work just as I do Shoah.

This is not to say that I feel every decision Spielberg makes is the right one, or even that he completely honors the subject matter. He paints Schindler's wife, Emilie, into the background, bringing her out only so Oskar can repent for having so many mistresses. According to the Schindler Jews, Emilie was as good a person as her husband, if not better. Even the wallflower cinematic version of her would had to have noticed all the odds and ends slowly disappearing from her house or the debt her husband amassed. When she appears at the end to stand over her husband's breakdown, her disjointed connection to the story stands out in horrible clarity. She should be sharing in that moment, not made to be a spectator.

Every time I watch Schindler's List I feel like I should resent it, if only because of the pressure to do so for its historical inaccuracies or its manipulative moments. But all films must smudge the ink somewhere (even most documentaries cannot get the whole picture), and if Schindler's List is to be considered manipulative, could that be because any imagery of the Holocaust will, must, grab us if we are good-hearted and humane people? The film sears in my memory, and I routinely think about certain aspects: that eerie smile on Fiennes' face, with its lack of gaps but inexplicable space between each tooth that gives every incisor or molar its own dangerous glint; Helena standing in the disorienting center of frame as she reflects upon her doomed life, well aware that Goeth will one day get over his fleeting attraction and put a bullet through her head; Schindler shouting "They're MINE" when Goeth casually speaks of taking his Jews for slaughter, a moment of passion his friend does not fully comprehend.

Schindler's List is not the first film to showcase Spielberg's aesthetic mastery within the confines of more serious-minded narrative ambition, but where The Color Purple used too many tricks to tell its story and Empire of the Sun eased up on the director's visual skills for its cynical but affecting humanism, Schindler's List finds the balance. Spielberg manages to get away with something as stylized as the Krakow raid, which features a scene of an SS officer playing Mozart on a piano in one of the ghetto apartments as muzzle flashes and machine gun ratatats serve as his audiovisual metronome, because he never lets the moment run off the dramatic weight. It may not hit me quite as profoundly as Empire of the Sun and its unique approach to and perspective of war cinema, but that nagging feeling that tugs at me every time I sit down to watch this film evaporates as I experience it. I would never presume to say the film captures even a fraction of the Holocaust; it is instead what Stanley Kubrick labeled it, not a film about six million who died but 1,000 who lived. It is worth telling the good stories with the bad; they deepen our understanding of mankind's darkest hour.

Cemetery Junction

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, perhaps the most influential comedy writers of the new millennium, have crafted two of the most mature, deeply felt, perfectly paced television comedies in the medium's history. When it comes to the cinema, however, they have a frustratingly childlike view: something about the size of a theatrical screen in relation to that of a television that makes them feel as if they must project something bigger and broader. They both said they wanted a movie to be seen in a theater, not as a DVD, but that ignores the massive shift in the moviegoing consciousness that began when VCR prices dropped in the 80s and has exploded with the advent of the affordable home theater.

That desire to live up to the grander size of the films that inspired them softens the numerable pleasures of Cemetery Junction and turns what could have been a masterful evocation of the duo's extremely natural, extremely cringeworthy style into a modest success that proves entertaining but frustratingly out-of-reach.


And yet, I liked it. Gervais and Merchant's television series were explorations of their fears, of being trapped in a dead-end life (The Office) and of selling out all integrity for a hint of fame (Extras and aspects of The Office). Cemetery Junction traces those fears to their roots, in Gervais' childhood home in a working-class section of Reading. There, the women grow up to be housewives, and the men follow their fathers to the factory.

Terrified of this endless cycle, Freddie Taylor (Christian Cooke) surreptitiously sneaks to the nicer side of Reading to apply for a job at a life insurance company run by Mr. Kendrick (Ralph Fiennes), a man who grew up in the same area as Freddie but managed to fight his way up the ladder. Specifically, Freddie envies the man's wealth, and Mr. Kendrick looks grimly amused at the boy's pluck, a hint of flattery tempered by the suggestion that the man finally his deepest wish: to become a legend back home.

The rest of the film pits Freddie's attempts to step up to the first rung of the corporate ladder while his friends, Bruce (Tom Hughes) and Paul, aka Snork (Jack Doolan), try to prevent him from even climbing that high. They continue to drink all day, get into fights and, in Bruce's case, bed as many women as possible -- poor Snork just never can play his cards right with the ladies. Freddie's ambition is interpreted, somewhat correctly, as bourgeois affectation, and his buddies love to cut him down, asking why the jobs in Cemetery Junction aren't good enough for him.

If The Office launched cringe humor into the mainstream, Cemetery Junction dispense with the humor and keeps the discomfort. These characters have not yet lived enough to draw dark comedy from their lives, simply stewing in misery. Underneath Bruce's rakish self-confidence is a deep bitterness over being abandoned by his mother, which he blames on his dad for not "being a man" and killing the bloke who destroyed their family. Were Paul a twentysomething today and not 1973, he would certainly have been at Wernham Hogg or some company like it, desperately puffing out his flabby chest (complete with a tattoo of a bare-breasted vampire that looks as if it were drawn with a pencil) in a vain attempt to impress people who hate his jokes and everything else about him as well. Gervais and Merchant try too hard to give Paul all the David Brent-esque lines, but it is when he stops trying to be a jokester and actually acts serious that he is most unsettling.

Worst, and therefore best, of all is Mr. Kendrick, a rotted soul who vigorously pursued a way out of Cemetery Junction and now has nothing to enjoy. He traps his wife (Emily Watson) in their lavish prison, preventing her from following whatever dreams she may have had to ensure his dominance. At a trumped-up banquet the company holds each year, he can barely contain his contempt for others, and his half-hearted go at honoring a retiring employee who devoted his entire life to the company is one of the most savagely dark and heartbreaking moments in the Gervais-Merchant canon. Mike (Matthew Goode), the best salesman at the company and fiancé to the boss' daughter (Felicity Jones), follows in Kendrick's footsteps, conniving old pensioners out of their money and disregarding Julie's dreams of becoming a photographer. An early promo for the film featured Gervais with Merchant speaking directly to the audience with Fiennes between them. Naturally, the way they brought Fiennes into the conversation was through Schindler's List, asking "Lot of laughs making that film?" What's funny is that Fiennes essentially plays Kendrick as Amon Göth, ignoring that he's in a nostalgic, lightly comic drama.

The genius of Kendrick's incessant, endothermic attitude stands out even more when compared to some of the more misjudged elements of the film. Paul's one-liners are too offensive for their own sake, to the point that he becomes predictable and the filmmakers lose the element of surprise that made Brent's outbursts so wild that the laughter caught in the throat because you'd swallowed your tongue in shock. Back home, Freddie sits at the table with his family, including his dad (Gervais) and grandmother (Anne Reid), as the poor boy must endure the lazy stream of racism that trickles from his elders' mouths. It's certainly a true-to-life touch, but Gervais and Merch overplay their hand, turning what could have been a funny group into a tedious array of reactionary caricatures.

The entire movie is a tug-of-war inside each character between the desire to get as far away from Reading as possible and the awareness that wherever one goes, it will still be the same. One can see Julie's future in her mother -- Watson's eyes brilliantly convey a deep pain that she has learned to resist but has never gotten used to -- and Bruce's beleaguered father shares more with his son that Bruce knows. But it all feels so generic at times, livened only by fleeting moments, never even full scenes.

The manner in which the film can move from engaging to eye-rolling in an instant is best exemplified by that awful "winner's ball" Kendrick throws to make door-to-door insurance salesmen feel like major stockholders in a Fortune 500 company. Paul manages to get himself on-stage with the band to sing a rousing version of Slade's "Cum On Feel the Noize" that somehow wins over the conservative old businessmen and their wives in attendance. Then, to transition from this joyous break from reality, the film awkwardly slams back into squirm humor as Snork, high on the attention, relates an obscene joke he heard earlier. Gervais and Merchant have the ability to portray comedy from the abyss and to capture an optimistic sense of romance and joy. They've even combined the two, but that only works when they start in the darkness and gradually find their way to the light. Cemetery Junction wants to be light and gently anti-nostalgic, making its odd dips into cringe -- even the gags that work -- feel out of place.

The filmmakers said they based the idea of the film on the lyrics of the Bruce Springsteen song "Thunder Road," which goes a long way toward explaining the massive potential in the film and its shortcomings. Springsteen's songs, one of the purest rock songs ever written, captures an intangible through the power of suggestion: Cemetery Junction is too autobiographical, too narrowly defined, to have the same pull. Yet certain touches resonated with me, like the local police sergeant who has such a rapport with the local rascals that he'll enjoy a pint with them before they get so drunk he has to lock them up. Having convinced the BBC to let them direct their first project despite no prior experience, Gervais and Merchant have clearly grown visually since then, and the half-sepia, half-smoggy cinematography courtesy of Remi Adefarasin is both beautiful and compressing, finding a better mix between the appealing and the repellent than the writing. Overall, the sweetness of some of the performances and the occasional flashes of humor that won out barely won me over, but I found myself too often wishing the film had been less "Thunder Road" and more "Backstreets."

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

Having re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows before seeing the first half of the story in David Yates' latest, I entered the cineplex ready to dub the latest adaptation of the most popular book franchise in the world Harry Potter and the Interminable Holocaust Allegory. This would not be entirely Yates' fault, mind you; there are fundamental flaws in the story that cannot be blamed on anyone involved with the production. The problems inherent in the film version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are the issues inherent in J.K. Rowling's final entry (one hopes) in her wildly successful series. When I devoured the closing chapter of Harry Potter's saga as an 18-year-old leaving high school just as the most visible pop culture symbol of my childhood came to a close, I loved every page. Absorbed by the action, I plowed through 759 pages in mere hours, sad to see these characters slipping away even as I propelled myself toward the end with breakneck speed.

What I saw upon a second reading, however, was the weakest book of the series since it moved into darker territory in the third entry. Pacing problems mired the first half in directionless muck, wallowing in dystopic Holocaust/post-9/11 allegory until exposition suddenly kicked in and never let up until the end (even the epilogue, which I found deeply unsatisfactory even on the first read, summarizes the futures of the characters with banal resolution). Yates' biggest contribution to the three Potter films he's helmed has been his commitment to retaining as much as possible of the novels while still releasing films at acceptable blockbuster length. Even The Order of the Phoenix, the longest and most meandering of the books, was whittled down to one of the shortest running times of any of the franchise movies without sacrificing the core of the work.

Ergo, his decision to split Deathly Hallows into two parts speaks less to the overflow of great ideas in Rowling's epic than a misguided attempt to use the final entry to give fans what fans always want: the entire book transposed to screen. Of course, fans don't know what they want, and it's interesting that the only fully successful adaptation of Rowling's books, Prisoner of Azkaban, owes its power to sacrificing the familiar plot elements to reach for a more magical and unpredictable atmosphere. There's nothing of the sort to be found in Yates' films, which suck the feeling of wonder from Hogwarts -- this was particularly evident in The Half-Blood Prince, which intriguingly dug beneath the oppressive and despairing tone of Rowling's best novel to find the feeling of appreciation and nostalgia for that which will soon be lost in the coming war, only to bungle this fascinating insight with a drab visual style.

I say all of this negative stuff to come to a surprising conclusion: David Yates got it right this time. More than that, he corrected what has been horribly wrong with the film franchise. If the director's defining trademark on the series so far was to ably cut down on excess while getting the story across unscathed, he proves by giving himself the space to breathe that, while he is still not cut out for the magical side of Harry Potter, he is abundantly capable of doing the one thing that no previous Potter film has managed: delve into the characters.

Whether shackled to the plot or simply under the impression that everyone had already read the books and thus did not need introduction nor updates on the characters, Harry, Ron and Hermione have often felt like spectators in their own saga, ushered from setpiece to setpiece before being made to deliver some line about the necessity of getting some Macguffin, the red herring that is Severus Snape and/or the importance of friendship, usually in the most breathless manner possible (Emma Watson in particular has always spoken her lines as if a mule kicked her in the stomach before the director yelled "Action!"). Here, however, Yates uses his spare running time to focus on the characters, and if Deathly Hallows Part 1 is about anything, it's about how these three young adults react to the horrifying situation in which they find themselves, a predicament so dire that even these battle-tested youths feel hopeless and directionless when confronted with it.

Undoubtedly aiding Yates and his aversion to the more mystical side of the mythos is the fact that Deathly Hallows is by some measure Rowling's most straightforward book, even if it is a tangled web of exposition. More indebted to Lord of the Rings than anything, the final book relies on an epic sweep of action to make up for a confounding and unsatisfying explanation for the final battle and heavy exposition throughout. Its emphasis on Holocaust imagery allows Yates to finally apply his more standard visuals to great usage, managing to turn a color palette that consists primarily of grays and grayer grays into something expressive.

So how does Harry Potter and the List of Schindler turn out? From the opening moments, as the sound of rusting and shrieking metal builds over a black screen before violently cutting out as the screen flashes an extreme close-up (the young woman in front of me actually dropped her popcorn tub in shock at this moment), Yates does a spectacular job of creating a sense of extreme discomfort, using Alexandre Desplat's dissonant score to keep you on edge even when the characters are sitting in a home. Nowhere is safe, no one can be trusted and it's only a matter of time before Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) uses his new control over the Ministry of Magic to track down his prey.

What, then, is a chosen one to do? After unloading a heaping pile of angst onto the audience with the film installment and indulging in puppy-dog teen romance with the sixth, Harry Potter and the Seven Beauties throws young adults into the real world, and the idea that Rowling plundered imagery from the most catastrophic event of modern times is a shrewd statement on how jarring true adulthood can be for increasingly sheltered youth. There are a few light chuckles to be found here as Rupert Grint continues his adorable "aw shucks" goofiness as Ron, but the dominant mood here is one of horror. Every time the kids manage to teleport themselves away from a fight, someone else finds them, and it's a wonder any of their hearts ever stop racing enough for them to sleep. After being decently entertained by the fourth film, bored by the fifth and frustrated by the misplaced emotional focus of the sixth, I was suddenly riveted. I even wanted to cover my eyes at times, so shaken by the world collapsing around these characters.

Mind you, there are a number of stumbling blocks in the film. For all the skill with which Yates handles the downtime, Harry Potter and the Boy in the Striped Pajamas still drags on far too long. A good 20 minutes could and should have been excised from the film for better flow. The gag of Harry's friends using Polyjuice Potion to disguise themselves as him to become decoys leads to some painfully unfunny humor too quickly out of the gate. Moreover, the dialogue in and around this scene is shamelessly expository, recalling not only moments from previous films but bits that were cut from the books for time. Another holdover from the book, Ron's petulant attitude toward the other two, is tired by this point: Rowling had so exhausted Ron's jealousy of Harry by the seventh book that she had to use the MacGuffin of the Horcrux, one of the seven enchanted objects that holds a piece of Voldemort's tattered soul, to bring out that tension again. At least Grint sells it well, and as much as this sort of thing brings back the angst that Rowling and the filmmakers separately beat to death with the fifth installment.

Actually, let's talk about that acting. I've always felt bad for the child actors in this series, forced to grow up and look talented when blanketed by, you know, every major story in modern British film. Still, they've never excelled, and Radcliffe in particular has never proven himself a star. Whether the result of maturation or the desire to go out with a bang, the three principal actors have dug deep and found a well of talent from which they'd not previously drawn. When Grint goes into his jealous fit, his eyes terrified me; I honestly thought he might lunge for not just Harry but Hermione as well. Watson tones down the histrionics and drops the endearingly nerdy side to tap into Hermione's insecurities at being the child of two Muggle parents, a fear exacerbated in the pureblood frenzy engendered by Voldemort (whose own blood is "tainted" with Muggle non-magic just as rumors abound to this day that Jews nested in Hitler's family tree). As for Radcliffe, he's come a long way from the boy who agonizingly ruined the terrifying revelation of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's return in The Goblet of Fire.

Yet these deepened insights come not from me-time showboating but group interplay. The way the three characters play off each other brings out these new traits, and for the first time all are developed in equal measure. Yates inserts a scene that was not in the book, placed after Ron, corrupted by the Horcrux, leaves his friends to try and find his family. As a devastated Hermione hugs a radio, Nick Cave's "O Children" comes on, and Harry, aware that they might both die at any second, extends a hand to his second-oldest friend and the two share a cathartic slow dance. This sequence is so ingenious, so well-executed and so planned-ahead for a later vision of Harry and Hermione kissing that torments the addled Ron that Rowling should call up Yates and writer Steve Kloves and thank them for improving her work.

When the action picks up, its more straightforward style allows Yates to focus less on the awe of a magical duel than the sheer terror of being hunted. After that failed lighthearted scene with the Harry duplicates, the Death Eater ambush that awaits the gang as they move to a safehouse is fantastically executed, harrowing and bewildering in the sudden assault. Harry Potter and the Day the Clown Cried even throws in a noble death that has already inspired various "Never Forget" messages and is a surprisingly tear-jerking moment considering the character in question hasn't shown up in the film series since The Chamber of Secrets. Even when Yates gets a bit too frenetic with a forest chase sequence, the action here is exhilarating and the kind of stuff that makes you grab your seat arm tighter. I also adored a brief animated sequence used to provide background on the titular deathly hallows, a bit of Gothic shadow puppetry that is as dark as anything in the film proper. Ben Hibon, who designed and directed this segment, went all out to make a haunting piece that resembles a sort of Slavic woodcarving of an old fairy tale, the kind that made even the happy endings fatalistic.

Naturally, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I feels incomplete, the setup to a finale that won't come until May of next year. But if having to wait six months is the price to pay for a Harry Potter film that finally passes muster, it's worth it. Previous films have used that who's-who supporting cast as a crutch, cutting to one of Alan Rickman's deliciously drawled one-liners or Maggie Smith's pert, slightly condescending humanism. Here, there's no one to distract from the principal cast, who are working without a net. They succeed beyond my wildest expectations, and after debating whether to see this at all or just wait until I unethusiastically double-bill the two parts of the film in May to break myself of the mediocre imagining of a key part of my childhood, I am thrilled that everyone involved finally got it right. The previous top dog of the films, The Prisoner of Azkaban, had the magic but not the story. This film, which lacks the magic by design, balances the visual impact with solid, if imperfect, storytelling, and it's all buoyed by terrific acting. Who could have guessed that the film to break Hollywood of its string of mediocre, audience-insulting blockbusters this year would be the latest entry in one of the most mediocre and audience-insulting blockbuster franchises of recent years?

Clash of the Titans (2010)

Liam Neeson said that he took the role of Zeus in Louis Leterrier's remake of Clash of the Titans because his sons love Greek mythology. When they saw the film, or even its predecessor, I wonder if one of them whispered to their father in the first minute, "Dad, the Kraken isn't Greek." No, not only is the Kraken not of Greek origin, it's not even a creature of ancient mythology, a combination of similar, fabled sea monsters of Norse sagas c. 12th century A.D. updated and given its first concrete classification all the way in 1735 by Carolus Linnaeus before being cemented into modern myth 20 years later by Erik Pontoppidan, the bishop of Bergen. According to Clash of the Titans, the Kraken was created by Hades to overthrow the titans, and along with it the thrilling complexities of Greek legend.

Why does Hollywood insist on altering Greek mythology for the purposes of making it "cooler"? After all, considering its appropriation by the Romans, the Greek lore was the mythology so nice, they used it twice. The Disneyfication of lore makes sense for the animated Hercules, precisely because it's too damn wild for children: in the actual mythology, the blackness of Chaos bore the first Titans, most importantly Gaia (Earth), who asexually conceived and gave birth to a son, Ouranos, who took his mother for his wife. Eventually, Gaia grew so outraged with her son-husband's domineering madness that she had one of her sons, Cronus, castrate him. Cronus married his sister and took his father’s place, eating all of his offspring out of fear save Zeus, hidden away by his mother. Eventually, Zeus revealed himself and poisoned his father into vomiting up the other gods, who overthrew their parents and imprisoned the Titans in Tartarus. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: the lore is thick with deceit, incest, wrath, jealousy and murder. In other words, it is almost exactly like French history.

I suppose it’s inevitable that Clash of the Titans should be so careless with its source material (its fundamental source material, that is), given the fact that at no point during the film does a Titan rear its gigantic head, much less clash with something or someone. When the first round of promotional material for the film slipped onto the Internet, the attached tagline, "Titans Will Clash" was met with well-earned derision, and when it slipped from the next batch of posters and trailers, one might reasonably have assumed that the studio backpedaled from the reception of the previous ads. Maybe they were just afraid of being sued for false advertisement.

To harp on that subject further, though, would be pointless, as the original Clash also lacked Titans. That appears to have slipped the minds of some of the more outraged critics sharpening their xiphos in preparation for battle; perhaps many do not remember the absence of titular clashers in the original because the original is itself so unmemorable, given a niche in film history solely for the effects of Ray Harryhausen. Tellingly, Harryhausen's remarkable stop-motion creatures are the only significant aspect of the first not to make its way into Leterrier's update, which ports over the cheesy dialogue, ludicrous narrative and wooden acting, as if to say that the negatives of cinema are timeless; its the innovation that fades.

So, yes, we still follow Perseus (Sam Worthington), mortal son of Zeus, cast into the sea with his murdered mother by the king she cuckolded. Rescued by a fisherman, Spyros (Pete Postlethwaite), who immediately launches into outraged platitudes toward the cruel gods, Perseus grows up to be a simple fisher, but even his adoptive father knows that the boy is destined for great things. Then the family finds themselves beside a cliff where soldiers from Argos topple a statue of Zeus in defiance of the gods. Hades rises from the depths, kills the soldiers and turns his sights on the innocent family's boat, killing Perseus' father, mother and sister. All of this occurs in the film just a bit faster than it took you to read this paragraph.

The rest of the film bounds along at this breathless pace, introducing a sliver of exposition in time to launch into another action segment, which itself is too brief and frenetic to properly engage the audience -- that damn Kraken appears in full-form for less than a minute -- before settling down into the next half-hearted setup. Perseus teams up with the god-hating Argives to defy Olympus and protect the city from destruction in retribution for their heresy, moving from a forest where he must fight his biological mother's mutilated husband, head out to the desert to meet Djinn (that's from Arabic mythology, right?) and fight off giant scorpions (um), go to the underworld, yadda yadda yadda.

Titans moves through these sequences as if ticking off items on a checklist, pausing only to let loose the sort of hysterically overbearing dialogue that practically defines these swords-and-sandals romps. Spyros kicks off the proceedings with his impromptu rant at the gods brought on by a fishing dry spell: "One day, somebody's going to have to say 'enough,'" he cries, apparently so green at his life's profession that he doesn't understand that the fish just don't bite sometimes. Had this been set in contemporary times, Spyros might easily have been one of those hyperbolic golfers who attributes every slice and near-miss to the cruel intervention of forces who apparently have nothing better to do than fuck with a peon. Everyone speaks in a tone of voice that suggests he or she is rallying the troops; didn't anyone in the mythological world ever just mosey on over to the town well for a light conversation, a nice chat about the Hydra someone's kid killed or the results of last night's Olympic match? Sam Worthington, who uttered last year's heavyweight champion Worst Line -- "Now I know what death tastes like" -- in Terminator Salvation manages to avoid the worst of the clangers, but he has to spend the entire film shunning the god in him, insisting on carrying out his tasks "as a man" until someone slaps some sense into him.

All of the actors look bored, as if they'd understood the cheesiness of the script and thought it would translate into a more raucous piece of entertainment. But as they traveled to various locations filled with the same sharp, rocky landscapes, so nondescript that one almost wishes they'd simply used CGI sets to cut down on the carbon emissions of all those plane rides, the gears started turning and each of the cast slowly came to the grim realization of how dull this picture really is. Worthington, still locked into his increasingly thin portrayal of a reluctant but determined hero, is as stony as all those statues that litter this ancient world, and if he did succumb to the Medusa when he enters her lair, I don't know that anyone would have been able to tell. Alexa Davalos plays Andromeda, the beautiful princess of Argos, whose sacrifice the gods demand for the forgiveness of the city, and her immediate willingness to die for her people somewhat takes the wind out the sails for the dramatic buildup of the rest of the film. Liam Neeson looks pleased enough to be there, but perhaps only because he shares most of his scenes with Ralph Fiennes, giving him a constant visual reminder that someone had it worse than him. Fiennes hisses more as Hades, lord of the underworld, than he does as the serpentine Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films. Dressed, amazingly, uproariously, in a fashion that resembles John Travolta's get-up in Battlefield Earth, Fiennes does not inspire terror so much as giggles.* He understandably looks eager to get off the set, though in that outfit maybe it's so he can audition to be in a black metal band that writes songs inspired by Lord of the Rings.

There are a few nice touches, to be fair. If Leterrier insists on casting aside Harryhausen's marvelous animation in favor of big CGI that doesn't look any better and is too haphazardly edited to be identified anyway, he at least did us the service of omitting Bubo, the R2-D2-esque robot owl from the original; Bubo even makes an appearance in an Argos armory, only to be thrown out of the picture when a soldier pressures Perseus to "just leave it." Andromeda spends the film either on her way to be dangled as bait for the gods' appeasement or finally on the rack, but the audience likely won't care either way about her thanks to the far more arresting character of Io. An ageless mortal who watches over Perseus, Io has a wit and a spark that no one else in the film approaches, and Gemma Arterton acts well beyond her 24 years, to the point that even her gorgeous looks have an air of maturity to them. And despite the general laziness of the action scenes, the Medusa sequence is genuinely entertaining. Like the rest of the scenes, it's too short, but at no other point in the film does Leterrier create and maintain a sense of tension and atmosphere.

It's a shame that filmmakers constantly flub Greek mythology, as it's the most interesting of all the major religions, old or new. Modern theologies posit all-powerful deities to be feared and worshipped incessantly, at once benevolent and wrathful. The Greeks, however, made their gods more human, not simply though the act of anthropomorphizing them through art but in simple conception. For them, gods were arrogant and inbred, capable of walking among their creations but never truly seeing them. The gods fear their children: they overthrew their parents, so naturally they fear a similar fate (remember that Zeus attempted to murder his own wife and child until Athena burst full-grown from his head). Clash of the Titans flirts with this astonishing notion, of the way that generations build off the last and better themselves instead of fade as increasingly faulty copies of a perfect original like CDs and swapped music files from a crisp master tape, but it does not follow through. It pays lip service to how "badass" it would be to fight monsters, ignoring that which is truly awe-inspiring: the fact that, if sufficiently motivated, a human can challenge the gods themselves.



*It would be nice, though, if someone would stop making Hades out to always be a villain just to make things easier for a crowd primarily raised on a new mythology by equating Hades to Satan. Hades is far more passive a figure in the legends, dispassionately maintaining balance instead of actively usurping and murdering. Death holds no grudges.

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker understands what makes a great war film. It is not apolitical, as many claim, but its politics are naturally and almost imperceptibly stated through the characters' actions, not their words. While a few great war films can wear their politics on their sleeves (Platoon), it's almost always more enjoyable to see minimal or at least vague rhetoric in the service of something deeper (Apocalypse Now). Bigelow's film fills the space left by its lack of open polemics with the the natural conversation of men too preoccupied with survival to discuss their various affiliations.

And tension. Unbearable, teeth-chattering tension. The tension of this film is so ever-present, so skillfully maintained, so...tense that at one point I noticed my hands were actually shaking. I nearly closed my eyes at several stages, as though I were watching an effective horror film. Which it is, essentially: The Hurt Locker is the story of a specialized type of warfare within a specialized type of warfare, where the faceless enemy is even more hidden.

Concerning the exploits of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) team, the film presents us with a group of soldiers who volunteer for one of the bravest tasks in the force: locating and disarming IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). On this battleground, a remote-detonating cell phone is more dangerous than an AK-47, and a pile of rubble can be either debris or a deathtrap.

Following the death of Bravo Company's previous team leader, Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) must welcome their new leader Sgt. 1st Class William James. Jeremy Renner gives one of the year's best performances as James, a cocksure ball of swagger and indifference who is at once the Army's ideal poster boy and everything that is wrong with the American mindset in Iraq. He's also what I believe they used to call "certifiable": on his first day, while other two still mourn their previous sergeant, he forgoes the safety of using their bomb-detecting robot to uncover a suspected IED and just dons a protective suit and checks it out himself. As he walks down the street, he's sure to make a show of it, as much for his new teammates as the Iraqis looking on from windows and roofs.

James' style puts him at odds with his more conventional teammates, to say the least, but you can't argue with results. After he successfully diffuses a car filled with enough explosives to take out a city block, an ecstatic colonel sings his praises as asks the soldier how many bombs he's disarmed, and James (in a rare show of humility) mumbles, "873, sir." He keeps the various triggers of his victories as morbid souvenirs in a basket along with his wedding ring ("all the things that nearly killed me," he chirps), and Eldridge and Stanborn only look on in revulsion. Each of these men fits a loose soldier archetype -- James the cocky one; Stanborn the cool, by-the-book operator; and Eldridge, the one who didn't realize what he signed up for and is slowly losing it over the stress of his job. That's understandable, I might add; I nearly lost it over watching a dramatization of it.

But writer Mark Boal, who spent time reporting with an EOD team and came up with the much of the material for Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah, sidesteps simple classifications and presents us with real people. Apart from a forced line at the start when James tells the men he's not "trying to replace Thompson," their conversations don't fall within the usual war movie talk of bad C.O.s and their opinions on why they fight. Their conversations and actions reveal their myopic views of the war, however; James views all of the Iraqis as merely spectators to his talent show, while the other two just see them as potential targets. James grows fond of a young Iraqi boy hawking DVDs to the GIs, but when he believes the boy was killed by insurgents he's so blinded by rage that he doesn't notice the kid saying hello.

I mentioned the tension earlier, but only in superlatives: Bigelow uses shaky cam footage in the most artistic, appropriate setting this side of a Paul Greengrass film. The draw of shaky cam is its purported ability to draw us into the action and make us a part of it, but too often it smacks of gimmickry. Bigelow's style allows her to capture the utter confusion of these soldiers' jobs, and every cut away to an observing Iraqi only bolsters the feeling of dread. She will make you fear the nondescript metal canisters -- actually, that's one of only two gripes I have with the film; why is it that all of the improvised explosive devices look the same? -- and the scene where James follows a wire to its source, lifts it up only to uncover five bombs surrounding him is bone-chilling.

There's also a scene out in the desert, where our team stumbles upon contracted mercenaries (and I was certainly surprised to see Ralph Fiennes among them) carrying two of the most wanted terrorist leaders and are suddenly ambushed by a sniper team. This protracted sequence, involving only a handful of enemy combatants, is as insular and nail-biting as the grandest battle scene is bombastic and horrific. The audience let out audible groans when Stanborn missed one of his extreme-long-range shots, but they did not cheer when a round did hit its target. Stanborn and James sit on their perch, utterly immobile as flies buzz on their eyelids and in their mouths, as wind gusts blow sand in their faces, for hours, and you can feel the passage of time. This sequence, for all its simplicity, belongs on the short list of the greatest battle scenes ever filmed. It is a masterclass in suspense and realism.

Bigelow has a way of presenting us with all the horrors of Boal's script without exploiting them, nor does she glorify (or condemn) these men. I say men because I noted the complete absence of any female soldiers in the film. I thought it was odd that Bigelow would not portray any women, which speaks more to my white male liberal guilt than it does any shortcomings on her or Boal's part. But I remember an interview with a female specialist given to Stephen Colbert in his recent Iraqi tour about the role of women in the service, and I looked it up and was shocked to discover that the closest a woman can come to a combat position is military police. I'd kind of like to see a film about that, though it would likely be preachy as hell.

At its heart, The Hurt Locker serves as a first-person view of the consummate terror of the current state of warfare, where enemies and allies are neither immediately identifiable nor constant. When James heads toward a bomb for his first defusion with his new company, a taxi driver nearly drives right into him, leading to a tense showdown with the sergeant fearlessly standing down a man who fluctuates between confusion and hatred; soldiers eventually take the man into custody, and James snidely remarks, "If he wasn't an insurgent, he sure as hell is now." The pressure of this doubt affects the men in different ways: Eldridge struggles to maintain his sanity, Sanborn adopts a by-the-book attitude that belies the skills he would have learned and used in his previous work in intelligence and, one can infer, allows him to brush off potential failure onto faulty directions. James, of course, finds a sick thrill in the unknown, and when something finally does penetrate his solipsist fog he's too egotistical to pay complete attention to it. His biggest display of a humanity is but a small basket -- the titular locker -- filled with pieces of all the bombs he defused, a perverse shrine that subtly reflects how, in some way, the job is taking its psychological toll on James as well, even if he never shows it.

In the epilogue, Bigelow follows a soldier back home for a time, at first too big a jump from the grittiness of Iraq but once your eyes adjust it paints a clearer portrait of these men, all brave and truly heroic but perhaps in the military because Iraq, for all its dangers, frightens them less than "normal" life. Plus, the forced perspective shot of the endless cereal aisle is a fun touch. Simply put, this is the finest film yet made about the Iraq war, and the finest picture concerning modern combat since Black Hawk Down. A mixture of Generation Kill's front-line honesty and one of the tensest thrillers of recent memory, The Hurt Locker is a triumph on every level and a film that's worth going out of your way to see.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

While I disliked the omissions and alterations of Prisoner of Azkaban when I first saw it, revisiting it after aging enough to distance myself from a rabid love of the books allowed me to appreciate it for the artistic triumph that it is. It's still got its fair share of weaknesses, but the character moments and stylistic feel made it far more interesting than the previous films combined. I noted with a certain sense of regret and resignation that Steve Kloves once again penned the screenplay for this next sequel, but Azkaban was a step up, so anything's possible, right?

To my surprise, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is almost as good as Prisoner of Azkaban, and sometimes a bit better. Cuaròn's direction hinted at an Expressionist influence, which the latest director, Mike Newell, mixes with the action movie vibe of the Triwizard challenges and really plays up in the final act, in which the film becomes a true horror film, albeit one softened to appeal to the young demographic. Mad-Eye Moody himself looks like he tumbled out of a Fritz Lang movie, while Hogwarts' juxtaposition o cluttered, maze-like halls and the quiet terrain that engulfs its exterior continues to cast a sense of foreboding.

Harry finds himself in the Triwizard tournament, which is only open to 17-year-olds, when his name somehow appears in the titular goblet, which announces the names of the champions representing each of the three schools involved: Fleur Delacour (Clémence Poesy) for Beauxbatons, star Quidditch player Viktor Krum (Stanislav Ianevski) for Durmstrang and Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson) for Hogwarts. Understandably, these rightful contestants and their headmasters are a bit miffed to discover that Hogwarts has two shots at glory and that such a young boy (the biggest celebrity in their world, no less) should steal the spotlight from them. Harry is simply terrified.

Aiding him in preparing for these tasks, naturally, are Ron and Hermione, who apparently reached the pitiful apex of their character arcs in the film series and must now start the slide down back into mediocrity and two-dimensionality. Harry's moodiness is on the horizon, but here it's Ron's time for angst, which just comes off as shallow. The book didn't handle this subplot in a particularly deep way, but you could at least understand why Ron, the dirt poor kid always in the shadow of the celebrity Harry and the whiz Hermione, might deeply resent his friend thrust into the spotlight yet again, but you'd think he take into account how much Harry loathes the attention and how he never seeks it. Watson reverts to that annoying breathlessness that defined her line deliveries in the first film. Even as she must deal with the half-formed love triangle involving Krum and Ron, she becomes less interesting than ever thanks to the incessant overacting.

Also helping out is Moody (Brendan Gleeson), a battle-scarred Auror (dark wizard catcher) with a fake leg and a magical replacement eye. He accepts the empty Defense Against the Dark Arts position, presumably because he clearly has so few limbs left to lose. Gleeson is on fire as the thundering, lumbering Moody, capturing the character's off-kilter, slightly sadistic humor nicely. The only other noteworthy addition is David Tennant as Barty Crouch Jr., though the nature of the character means he remains mostly unseen, unfortunately.

Each of the Triwizard tasks are filmed with a harmonious blend of blockbuster action and darker chills, particularly in the the reedy mire of the lake bottom and the icy fright of the maze. When Harry winds up in a graveyard to face his nemesis, the tone only grows colder, thanks in no small part to Ralph Fiennes' short but sweet appearance as the reconstituted Voldemort. Before he even utters a word, you know they found the right man for the job: Voldemort speaks not with an evil, serpentine hiss but with the ennui befitting someone so powerful. The wretched stammering of his summoned followers doesn't concern him, and the only time he displays any emotion at all is in his wrath toward Harry. Fiennes is one of the finest casting choices yet in a franchise stuffed to the gills with magnificent actors.

Sadly, many of the newcomers fail to elicit any response other than annoyance. Pattinson's job is simply to stand there and look pretty (a damn fine warm-up for Twilight if there ever was one), while Poesy and Ianevski act like caricatures. Miranda Richardson knows the steps but not the rhythm to muckraking gossip hag Rita Skeeter, and what might have been a nice commentary on the corruption of glamorization of the media is sacrificed in favor of a paper-thin characterization (you can deal with adult themes in kid movies; see Pixar). Roger Lloyd Pack plays Barty Crouch Sr. less on the verge of a breakdown as in the novel as insufferably wild-eyed. I know Gary Oldmans had more practice at playing loopy, but compare his mania in the third film to Pack's mugging and there's just no contest in the crazy department.

Still, despite some terrible dialogue delivered in manners that don't help the matter, Goblet of Fire does a marvelous job of sustaining the excellence of the previous film while adding enough plot back in to make a reasonable and linear narrative. I still prefer Azkaban for its artistry, but Newell should be commended for finding a working blend of the inoffensive popcorn sheen of the first two films with the darker tone and direction of the third.

In Bruges

There's a refreshing audacity in Martin McDonagh's feature-length debut that is so lacking in Hollywood today. McDonagh, one of the UK's most celebrated modern playwrights, claims his first love was film, and that joy practically leaps off the screen and asks you for a dance. Don't get me wrong: this is not some musical, or even a happy movie, but it's so gleefully ignorant of the "right" ways to make movies that it carves out something wholly unique and indefinable. To those who say "you need to know the rules before you can break them:" meet Martin McDonagh.

You know something special is on the horizon from the very start of the film, as a man recounts completing an assassination and being told to flee London for Bruges. "I disn't even know where Bruges was." A pause. "It's in Belgium." Our narrator is Ray (Colin Farrell), a hitman hiding out in the city after a hit goes horribly (and very, very darkly funny) wrong. Accompanying this fresh-faced nervous wreck is Ken, played marvelously by Brendan Gleeson. Ken looks after Ray and conferences with their boss Harry, a man whose importance and legend is conveyed without ever mentioning them.

At first the two seem like obvious foils, and they are: Ray looks young and handsome but broils inside with guilt, while Ken, sporting what Ebert terms "that noble shambles of a face" presents himself as a kind and caring man who ust so happens to kill people. Ken looks at all the medieval architecture in wonder, spouting off facts he gleaned from brochures. In a way, he seems younger and more idealistic than Ray, who couldn't care less about any of the sights. You get a taste of how un-P.C. the film will get when Ray dismisses the whole town in an argument with Ken: "If I grew up on a farm, and was retarded, Bruges might impress me but I didn't, so it doesn't."

McDonagh does structure things like a play, but he never falls into the perilous trap of the playwright-cum-director. Yes, the film has three acts, but then don't most films, regardless of whether or not they're adapted from a play or written by a playwright? Besides, the acts defy any set logic: each act introduces and ends a new conflict while contributing to the overall story, yet at no point does the movie feel episodic.

First we see Ray and Ken adjust to this European fairytale land, and finally we learn what went wrong with his first hit. The startling revelation leads to an emotional fallout in the second act, as Ray grapples with his demons and Ken must deal with an order from Harry to dispose of the lad for his errors. When Ken ultimately refuses, we finally, after two-thirds of the movie, see Harry. Now, he's on the poster and the DVD cover so it's not like I was surprised, but I can't tell you my joy when Ralph Fiennes popped on screen on the other end of that telephone. He's received no end of accolades, but he's just one of those actors that can so thoroughly entertain in anything he does that he almost feels underrated. In a way, the film ends with the inevitable shootout, but it plays out in ways that are anything but clichéd.

Filling in the gaps of all this is our heroes' rambling forays into the city and the utterly bizarre people they meet. The two consume astonishing amounts of lager and stumble onto the set of a film starring a dwarf, whom Ray repeatedly refers to as a "midget" even though he knows it's not the proper term. He also strikes up a relationship with Chloë (Clemence Poesy), one of the production designers who actually just steals and supplies drugs to the stars. All of this leads to numerous scenes too bizarre to place into words (unless you're McDonagh, of course), and every last one is screamingly funny. It's the kind of humor you really shouldn't be laughing at, yet McDonagh is above simple shock comedy: Ray uses all sorts of un-P.C. language, but in such a way you're far more caught off guard by the context of the jokes than the words.

2008 didn't exactly deliver the goods in terms of great movies (especially in comparison to the slew of magnificence in 2007), but In Bruges stood out amongst the few. It wasn't the funniest film of the year, but it flouts so many clichés and goes in so many unexpected directions that it entertained me far more than the funnier Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It's the kind of film that's easy to overlook, but do yourself a favor and sit down with this endlessly dark yet very human comedy.

The Reader

Can we all sign a petition barring Hollywood from making any further films about the Holocaust? Even “Schindler's List,” unquestionably the finest film on the subject ever put out by the mainstream, falters when Spielberg prevents us from feeling what we should in order to paint a flattering, romantic (though certainly interesting) portrait of Oskar Schindler. Likewise, Stephen Daldry's latest opus conjures the memory of the greatest tragedy in human existence only to use it as an emotional crutch to grab the audience without ever bothering to earn our attention.

“The Reader” concerns Michael Berg, a lad who had a summer-long affair with an older woman in his adolescence, only to find her in court tried for war crimes as an adult. Berg is played by David Kross in his youth and Ralph Fiennes in his adulthood, though Kross gets the most screen time. As a young teenager Michael collapses with scarlet fever on the streets, only to be escorted home by tram conductor Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). After the boy regains some strength, he visits her home to express his gratitude, and she seduces him.

For the entire summer of Michael's "recovery," he goes to Hanna's house for some nookie and, as per her request, reads to her. He brings all of his schoolbooks, from Huckleberry Finn to The Odyssey, and she gazes in awe as he recites these classics. One can easily guess why she asks him to read to her, why she has that look of longing on her face as that timeless prose pours out of Michael's lips or why she needs to have certain words defined, but Daldry saves that for later, presumably as a "twist."

These scenes between Kross and Winslet work because of the skill of the two actors, but they never lead anywhere and they’re insufferably repetitive. The entire first hour is a nonstop cycle of Michael’s illicit activities, with almost no variation between them. After a time I began to wonder if I was watching a bad copy of the film with a looping reel or perhaps, like Billy Pilgrim before me, I had come unstuck in time.

Then the film moves forward to deal with Hanna’s trial, where she must face accusations that she and other guards allowed 300 Jewish women to die in a burning church during the war. As the trial plays out, we learn that Hanna accepts responsibility out of shame of that condition that we easily guessed at the start. I’m hesitant to provide spoilers, but the only way that the “big reveal” will shock you is if you fell asleep in the first hour which, upon reflection, wouldn’t be a surprise.

After waiting all this time for the film to go somewhere, I suddenly wished it had stayed in its rut. I’ve always wanted a film that really examined what made Germans complicit in the Holocaust, what drove so many to join the SS, but the explanation we receive here is enraging. Not only is it too absurd to dwell on, but it twist the Holocaust around into an unfortunate mark on Hanna’s past instead of being, you know, the HOLOCAUST. I won’t go so far to say it disrespects the six million Jews and five million others who died, but it certainly disrespects your intelligence.

Mixed with Daldry’s poor direction—his haphazard and pointless intercutting between timelines especially sticks out— “The Reader” boasts fine performances from Winslet and Kross but fails in every other respect. In some ways I understand Hollywood’s softening of the Holocaust; I don’t know if any normal person could really handle the full scale of its horror. I myself have had great difficulty working my way through “Shoah,” the expansive, 9-½ hour documentary on the subject, because it’s so brutal. Nevertheless, films like “The Reader” continue the mainstream’s tendency of using the Holocaust as a tool, a means to facile string-tugging, instead of treating it with a humbled reverence. Perhaps one day we’ll see Hollywood come out with a film that actually bothers to tell the story of all those who died solely for their heritage the way it should be told, but in the meantime we’ll have to continue putting up with this sort of nonsense.

The Duchess

How many period pieces has Keira Knightley been in now? Even the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films put her in corsets and frumpy dresses. Hot off the heels of the inexplicably lauded “Atonement,” Knightley signed up for yet another fashion show as film, this time about the story of Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire.

“The Duchess” is a look back on a simpler time, a proper time, where proper people of proper stock received proper education and properly traded their proper daughters to other families for powerful and proper marriages as if they were property. Georgiana is no exception, and at the start of the film she is betrothed to William Cavendish, the Duke of Devonshire (Ralph Fiennes). Her initial excitement at her rise in social rank gives way to a growing discomfort with her dispassionate husband, a seemingly dull man whose only interest is a male heir. As the film progresses, his distant nature gradually shifts into a monstrous smoldering, turning to mistresses to provide him a son and essentially imprisoning his wife in their home.

The acting is uniformly strong. Knightley, who thus far has relied on little more than her attractiveness to get by in these films, captures the feel of the character perfectly; she carries the weight of the world on her shoulders as she must deal with her husband’s cruelty, her friend’s betrayal, and the constant attention of the other nobility, whom she must wine and dine incessantly. She seems constantly on the verge of collapse, until she must put on a happy face for her guests, and Knightley hits all the right notes. Ralph Fiennes is a perfect fit as the Duke; there’s just something a bit intimidating about the man. When he smiles at you and talks you get the feeling that, at any moment, some hunchbacked minion is going to sneak up from behind and knife you. Properly, of course. He is never loud, nor scheming, but you come to fear this man over the course of two hours. A host of supporting actors also turn in strong work, with nods going to Hayley Atwell as Georgiana’s best friend and William’s mistress and Simon McBurney as Charles Fox, a leader of the Whig party.

Unfortunately, Saul Dibb’s direction turns what might have been an interesting biopic and one of the better period pieces of recent years into an overlong, boring mess. If I had to spitball a number, I’d say at least half the shots of the film are close-ups on Knightley, which makes sense in a way because the film is basically about how everyone revolved around her except her husband. However, this seems less an artistic and thematic choice and more an excuse to say “Hey, look how pretty Keira Knightley is.” Well done, Mr. Dibb. I can only pray the reserves of movie magic were not expended in this effort. When the camera does move to follow someone, it fails to capture the scope of the time. This was a time of rampant excess, when palaces and dresses and hairstyles and meals were so huge they blinded the nobility to the actual state of their nations. Why is so little shown to us then?

The stated running time of the film is 110 minutes, but it feels an hour longer. Uninteresting scenes drag on far too long, occasionally leading to a rewarding payoff from the actors but usually just adding in some absurd dialogue. Also, why do the women in these films always seem surprised by how sexist the world of European nobility is? I’m beginning to think that all these films are about time travel, because surely a noblewoman raised in high society would know exactly what it had in store for her and would stop acting so damned shocked that she has no say, regardless of title. I agree that the sexism of the time- or now- is deplorable, but let the audience register its own disbelief of the etiquette and social mobility rather than make anachronisms and fools out of characters so we have someone to relate to. This film had promise, but snail-like pacing has derailed a good premise before, and much that “The Duchess” has to offer is spoiled because of it.