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George Clooney’s fourth feature debuted at Toronto, where a fair grumbling scrum of reviewers called it “cliché,” found its backstairs politics less than interesting, said there was nothing “new.” I say that’s spinach, and to hell with it. Have movies about politics become like movies about sex, where fears and predilections of its critics are imposed atop opinions like damning CT scan results? Were they onto something? Does a process story like this, with its lightly coded spoken shorthand, extend beyond steady followers of politics? (“She’s gonna take this to Drudge or Roll Call or some shit.”) While traipsing a few familiar byways, the theme-and-variation script of “The Ides Of March” is one of the boldest political statements by an American filmmaker in memory: the telling’s not resigned to corruption or concession, but instead, it’s cognizant. Read the rest of this entry »

Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) runs a Washington, D.C. boarding house where John Wilkes Booth (Toby Kebbell) and others conspired to kill President Abraham Lincoln (Gerald Bestrom), the Vice President and Secretary of State in 1865. Called before a military tribunal, Surratt is defended by Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), a Union Army captain. Robert Redford directs “The Conspirator” as a courtroom thriller and civics lesson on the judiciary in times of political fear that are rather like our own. Surratt, a resentful Southern sympathizer, and Aiken, a rookie lawyer who rose to the rank of captain fighting the South for four years, start off distrusting one another. Soon Aiken sacrifices career prospects and friendships to fulfill his duty. Railroading tactics of the prosecutor only incite him to take a higher road. (He also comes to discover his client’s likely innocence.) Read the rest of this entry »

Or, “doesn’t work” as the case may be. Waxworks filmmaking of intermittent animatronic voltage, Woody Allen’s fortieth feature, “Whatever Works,” is reportedly a long-shelved script he’d written for the late Zero Mostel back in the era of “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan.” “The Meanest Man in the World,” it was called. Allen’s claimed in the past not to have castoffs; there are few clues to the present day, although a line of voice-over does invoke President Obama. It’s another February-December romance in which the overbearing Manhattan motormouth and egotist Boris Yellnikoff takes in chicken-fried runaway Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood, who finds music in her character where Allen has provided little or none), whom he dubs a “sub-mental baton twirler” but eventually takes into his bed and marries. Larry David handles the mouthpiece chores here, reciting garrulous harrumphs of abuse directly to the camera; the prolix bursts, studded with calls to bring down the “sub-mental inchworms” and “pygmies” of society, do indeed sound like a first draft from oh-so-long ago, and the self-realization clichés in store do sound very, very 1970s. With Patricia Clarkson as Melodie’s mother, who discovers her inner artist, and Ed Begley, Jr. as Melodie’s father, who discovers his inner gay man. Nuance does not abound. With Michael McKean. 92m. (Ray Pride)

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In his seven-minute animated short “Terra” (2003), Aristomenis Tsirbas portrayed a teenaged being named Mala who defied The Elders by inventing a telescope to peer at a distant entity headed toward their planet Terra. “Terra” ended with the revelation that the anticipated “new god” in the sky was in fact an approaching warship emblazoned with a U.S. flag. Instead of stars for fifty states, there were 765 stars. Now Tsirbas expands his CGI short into an animated feature in “RealD 3D.” Evan Rachel Wood voices the intrepid Mala, who looks like a saucer-eyed planaria with a pug nose and a nice smile. Read the rest of this entry »

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“The world doesn’t give a shit about me. I’m here. I’m really here.” I don’t know all the implications that can be wrought from this great line in “The Wrestler,” an original script by Robert D. Siegel, a former editor of The Onion. But self-pity is never part of it. Mickey Rourke, a thousand punches, blows and self-lacerations since his pretty-boy days of “Diner” and “Rumble Fish,” is the fleshy center of Darren Aronofsky’s movie, passion played again and again. Simple and unadorned, it’s both tragic and touching. Rourke plays “Randy the Ram” Robinson, a professional wrestler in his early 50s, living day-by-day, match-by-match, pill-by-pill. He’s a lonely man. Rourke plays him without vanity, unless you consider the vanity of stripping to muscle as if muscle were bone. One of Randy’s great hopes is getting closer to “Cassidy” (Marisa Tomei), a stripper he frequents. Tomei’s quietly fierce performance keeps stripper clichés at bay. There are jokey references to “The Last Temptation of Christ” as they banter in the club’s space to the side. The rending of flesh is made particular. It both diminishes and embellishes Randy’s ground-level transfiguration. And quickly, quietly, it sneaks in—you realize that “The Ram” and “Cassidy” are mirrored: merchants of flesh, exploiters of their own bodies, right past their prime. It’s a powerful duality, especially within the actors’ mutual lacks of vanity. Later, there’s a gag with a small kid who’s bored by the Nintendo game that featured Randy: pixels past prime. Steeped in sorrow, mingling overstatement and understatement, “The Wrestler” is smart, goofy, heartening entertainment. With Evan Rachel Wood, Todd Barry, Mark Margolis. 109m. Widescreen. An interview with Aronofsky will appear next week. (Ray Pride)

Vadim Perelman (“House of Sand and Fog”) directs Emil Stern’s adaptation of Laura Kasischke’s 2002 novel. One lovely April day, two high schoolers in the girls’ bathroom face a classmate on a shooting spree. Flashbacks and flashforwards interpolate the girls’ lives leading up to that awful day when the shooter asks the best friends which one he should kill, and the fifteenth anniversary memorial service that only one can attend. The title is a literal description of the narrative premise. A poet who teaches at the University of Michigan—her current courses are Advanced Narrations and Poetry Writing Workshop—Kasischke’s prose overflows with allusion. On her first page she describes the pages of an English lit anthology as so thin, “they’re like dead girls’ dreams, translucent skin.” An epigraph by Apollinaire cites “my youth, dead with the spring.” Although the film’s visual design translates the novel’s evanescent hyper-sensitivities with lyrical focusing, close-ups and slow-motion, there are less subtle notes: the Zombies song “She’s Not There” on the film’s soundtrack is a tip-off. (“I wish I’d thought of it,” emailed Kasischke.) One girl is Maureen (Susan Sarandon’s daughter Eva Amurri from “The Banger Sisters” and “Saved.”) The other is the 17-year-old Diana, played by Evan Rachel Wood (“Thirteen,” “Down In The Valley”), and played by Uma Thurman (“My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” “Gattaca”) as an adult with a prof husband, a troubling 8-year-old daughter, a perfect flower garden and post-traumatic hallucinations. Portions of this psychological mystery transpire inside a left temporal lobe where a bullet comes to rest, but at heart it’s an original tale of unlikely pals: sorta slutty Diana teases Maureen the Christian about the Rapture. 90m. (Bill Stamets)