As they no doubt teach in thriller screenwriter workshops, don’t put a soldering iron in the hand of a loving father in the first minute if you’re not going to bring it back to engineer chaos later. Screenwriter Kurt Wimmer and director F. Gary Gray (“The Italian Job”) put together a passable genre product set in Philadelphia. It’s Assistant District Attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) versus Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) The former boasts of his 96-percent conviction rate; the latter aims to “bring down the whole fucking diseased corrupt temple down on your head.” Back to the soldering iron. Clyde is tinkering at home. Enter two home invaders. Clyde survives. His wife and daughter do not. One bad guy gets a deal. The other gets the death penalty. Ten years later both die by vicious extra-judicial measures. Clyde masterminds extravagant “biblical” revenge on the courts and the malpractice of justice. (The press notes pitch “Law Abiding Citizen” as “an incriminating look at the inconsistencies of an overloaded justice system.”) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A romance about terrorists and foiled ideals and fitful dreams: is that permitted? In Uli Edel’s entertaining if less-than-coherent rollercoaster docudrama “The Baader-Meinhof Complex,” a collection of post-Nazi-generation radicals calling themselves the Red Army Faction, led by journalist Ulrike Meinhof and activists Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, trouble 1970s Germany. A serious subject discussed in the omnibus film “Autumn in Germany” and fictionalized in R. W. Fassbinder’s “The Third Generation,” Edel’s approach, produced and co-written by Bernd Eichinger (“Downfall”)  is less weighty, at times even exploitative, yet at moments more discerning: what of youth’s arrogant impulses could lead to such forms of revolt, unlikely to sway common burgher or privileged politician? The lessons for today are implicit; the lectures few; the narrative clotted and wayward. Lovingly shot  by Rainer Klausmann (“The Lemon Tree,” “Downfall,” “Head-On”). With Simon Licht, Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu, Hannah Herzsprung, Susanne Bormann, Nadja Uhl, Volker Bruch, Jasmin Tabatabai. 150m.  (Ray Pride)

By Ray Pride

The Music Box and IFC offer canny  counter-programming to this week’s wide release of Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,” a historical revenge fantasy about World War II resistance in a mythical France, by offering “Flame & Citron,” Ole Christian Madsen’s crisp, efficient thriller, based on fact, about resistance to the Nazi invaders in Denmark in 1944.

“When your nation is invaded you have to make very important decisions. What do you chose?” is Madsen’s simplest declaration of what his film is about. The themes are timeless and painfully timely: think Tehran. “Flame” and “Citron” were the code names for two resistance fighters, 23-year-old Bent (Thure Lindhardt) and 33-year-old Jørgen (Mads Mikkelsen, seen previously in “Pusher” and “Casino Royale”). Flame, with notably fiery hair, wants to launch armed counterattacks against the occupying forces. Citron, Flame’s driver, and a family man, becomes more and more involved in the clandestine activities. Things go wrong, loyalties are questioned, deeper moral issues are sketched in. The script’s psychological observation is acute and Madsen’s command of dynamic action filmmaking is gratifying. Read the rest of this entry »

Writer-director David Twohy (“The Chronicles of Riddick”) opens this sub-par psycho-thriller with a wedding video. Pals from film school give the groom a send-off for a Hawaii honeymoon. The next couple we see pays in cash for hiking permits for the Kalalau Trail leading to “the most gorgeous dead-end God ever made,” according to a local. As newlyweds Cliff and Cydney (Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich) drive off, their jeep wheel rolls over a newspaper with a front-page story about the grisly slaying of newlyweds. En route to the the trail head, Cliff and Cydney meet a creepy couple of white-trashy hitchhikers Cleo and Kale (Marley Shelton and Chris Hemsworth). Class friction and paranoid profiling ensue. On the trail, Cliff and Cydney meet another couple, Nick (Timothy Olyphant) and Gina (Kiele Sanchez) who seem less creepy than Cleo and Kale, at first. The press notes brag that Twohy “happily breaks the conventional rules of three-act linear storytelling” and that he “refused pressure from other would-be financiers to make the story more conventional.” Not spoiling anything other than Twohy’s shaky take on genre, but his “script’s arrhythmic structure” amounts to little more than one black-and-white flashback that explains a twist. Hard to imagine: this thriller has a twist. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

For his more ambitious second film, writer-director Rian Johnson goes beyond the single location of San Clemente, California of his 2005 debut “Brick,” an idiosyncratic spin on film noir. For his international con caper, “The Brothers Bloom,” he shoots in the Czech Republic, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia. “Brick” coined argot for teen crooks and their classmates; “The Brothers Bloom” creates orphan rivals who concoct detailed characters to play when they pull off baroquely finessed scams. The older brother is Stephen (Mark Ruffalo), a consummate storyteller who scripts personas for his younger sibling to assume. Bloom (Adrien Brody), though, wants free. He cries, “I want an unwritten life.” True to the genre, there’s that one last con. The duo target a New Jersey heiress with idle wealth. Penelope (Rachel Weisz) describes her only hobby as “I collect hobbies.” One of them is pinhole photography: “a photograph is a secret about a secret,” she says in her own meta-mode of making observations. Drawn into the brothers’ machinations, her role is more than a cog. Romance enters. She counsels her dear Bloom: “there’s no such thing as an unwritten life, just a badly written one.” Johnson indulges in a little over-writing by overlaying deception upon deception. “The perfect con is the one where everyone gets just what they wanted,” announces Stephen. “The Brothers Bloom” pays, if what you do want is a rollicking lark with witty lines and characters like an explosives connoisseur called Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi, “Babel”). With Maximilian Schell, Robbie Coltrane. Ricky Jay narrates. 113m. (Bill Stamets)

“Angels & Demons,” novelist Dan Brown’s 2000 bestseller, is adapted for the screen by the same screenwriter, cinematographer, editors, production and costume designers, composer and director for Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” in 2003. Brown writes thrillers about centuries-old conspiracies, wherein Catholics kill Catholics to keep holy and unholy secrets. In the earlier film, Leonardo da Vinci encrypted clues in a painting that led to other clues of Jesus fathering a daughter whose current living descendant is a Paris cop on the cryptology beat. Isaac Newton was implicated. In this slick, risible film, Bernini encrypted clues in marble to direct church traitors to a secret subterranean meeting place. Galileo Galilei is drawn in. Both films are directed by Ron Howard and both star Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

There’s a lovely, lovely comic harrumph from Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels”: “Nothing like a deep-dish movie to drive ‘em out in the open!” Sturges adored both the patrician and the philistine in human nature and made comic hey-hey out of both. Jim Jarmusch’s latest, the glorious, gleaming, controlled-in-the-service of repetition-compulsion “The Limits of Control” managed in its first weekend in New York and Los Angeles to drive a raft of nay-saying critical minds out into the open, and it’s a bit of a sorrow to read so many resistant to its hypnagogic pull. The Wall Street Journal’s smart Joe Morgenstern’s review read, in total, “Jim Jarmusch’s Dada meander, shot by Christopher Doyle, is empty and excruciating—that’s really all you need to know.” This may not be your cup of cinema, but cinema it is, and it’s dreamy. And if you love movies, it’s aromatic, deep-dish as all get-out. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Michael Keaton, who starred in “My Life” as a Chicago native with terminal kidney cancer, returns here as a Windy City hitman and tailor, as well as the film’s director after an acute case of appendicitis prevented Chicago writer Ron Lazzeretti from directing. Keaton’s ever-coughing character, Frank Logan, is felled with a case of pneumonia. He also has an untreated condition. Drawn to precipices, he stands atop tall buildings and bridges to ponder doing the right thing by doing himself in. In the meantime, he sublimates his business ethics by staging hits to look like suicides. One snowy night Keaton perches on a rooftop after making a kill, with a silencer, in a nearby office. Like the Batman he’s played twice before, Keaton could pass as a shadowy gargoyle. As Kate Frazier (Kelly Macdonald) leaves work that night she looks up and sees his silhouetted figure. The next day two detectives come around. One of them, Dave, is played by executive producer Tom Bastounes, Lazzeretti’s co-writer on his 1999 feature, “The Opera Lover.” (Bastounes also played the titular lead.) Dave tries to date Kate, who just moved here. Like her new co-workers, he too asks her where she got her black eye. She says she was bumped while using a telescope, and tells no one about the abusive husband she fled, until this creepy born-again cop tracks her down and begs forgiveness. Dave and Frank try to protect her. Kate fears God may not forgive her for consorting with a fallen guardian angel that may answer her prayers for protection. Keaton’s best scene in this understated thriller places Kate and Frank in a hospital room on Christmas day. The timing of their silences is near perfect. Cinematographer Chris Seager nails the overcast hues of “Payback” and “The Weather Man.” And editors Howard E. Smith and Grant Myers compose a closing montage for an existential riff on the old-fashioned cliffhanger. 96m. Anamorphic 2.39 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

RECOMMENDED

Reporter thriller “State of Play” lines up a full roster of the usual players for an entertaining tutorial on D.C. insiders, mercenary corporations and marital deceit. Toss in two junkies cruising Starbucks for briefcases and laptops to boost for ransom, and one freelance black-ops patriot with a father-figure issue. The key players, though, are chasing the scoop on a zesty conspiracy. Tubby Cal McCaffrey (Russell Crowe) is an old-school street reporter who treats cops to coffee at crime scenes. Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) is his paper’s twenty-ish blogger on the “personal relationships in the political sphere” beat. And Helen Mirren plays their crusty editor at The Washington Globe (The Washington Post gets a “Special Thanks” in the credits) that’s jerked around by new owners. Newspaper readers and fans of the newsie genre will like this Della n’ Cal exchange: “Did we just break the law?” – “Nope, that’s what you call damn fine reporting.” Read the rest of this entry »

After cracking codes embedded in parchment locked in the National Archives and Library of Congress, Nicolas Cage now plays John Koestler, an M.I.T. astrophysicist who deciphers a page of numbers sealed in a time capsule. Lucinda (Lara Robinson), the weirdest kid at William Dawes Elementary School, penciled this string of digits in 1959 as a cacophony of voices echoed in her troubled little head. Turns out she was channeling instructions for her future granddaughter Abby (also played by Robinson). Koestler’s kid, Caleb (Chandler Canterbury), hears the same whispers and sees Whisper Men lurking in the shrubs. These black-coutured, bleach-blond, too-tall humanoids look like they could do security or bus dishes at a trendy late-nineties club in Helsinki or Hong Kong. And they look a lot like the aliens in “Dark City.” In both films director Alex Proyas calls them “Strangers.” The screenplay is by Ryne Douglas Pearson (whose “Mercury Rising” focussed on an autistic Chicago boy with a knack for numbers), Juliet Snowden & Stiles White. Koestler attempts to stop a terrorist attack in New York City, keep the mute strangers in drab sedans away from his son, mourn his late wife, reconcile with his father the pastor, and revise his anti-determinist doctrine on the random cosmos. “Knowing” goes where few films other than “A.I.” and “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” have gone before: imagine no more life on Earth as we know it. But Proyas lets us also imagine amazing friends from far away who will help us, or a select few of us, or maybe just two of us. Bold hits of special effects boost the paternalist spin on the ultimate afterlife. Ezekiel and Corinthians are invoked instead of the over-used Revelations. “Knowing” reveals the GPS address for a stairway to heaven, and transports Abby and Caleb to Eden 2.0, complete with a Tree of Knowledge. With Rose Byrne, Simon Duggan, Adrienne Pickering and D.G. Maloney. 121m. (Bill Stamets)