I have been working on this article for quite a while. When I started, some of these might have been lingering in theaters into the fall, but they are now long gone. The films in this review are now (or soon will be) available for home viewing either on pay-per-view or DVD. Some of these are among the most noteworthy films released in 2009 and are reaping the rewards of this during this year’s ongoing award season. During this time of snowstorms and winter cold, it may be a good opportunity to catch up with films that were released a few months ago that may have gotten by you at your local theater.

One of my favorite films from this past summer is the documentary Food, Inc. This film is a comprehensive analysis of American food production and how dramatically it has changed over the last fifty years. The film covers a lot of serious issues, and the film, unfortunately, is full of disturbing material. It does, however, end hopefully and clearly advocates for filmgoers to take a more active role in changing the food industry. A lot of this information has been floating around for a number of years, but the film does a wonderful job in tying it all together. This is a powerful film about an issue—food—that is important for everyone. 

My editor and I often decry films about artists because they usually devolve into cataloguing the most colorful and decadent aspects of their lives and simply neglect whatever art—be it literature, painting, poetry, drama, sculpting, or what have you—the film’s subject happened to do. Séraphine provides a window into French painter Séraphine de Senlis’s (Yolande Moreau) difficult life and shows how painting was a solitary passionate creative outlet that she worked on during every free moment from her jobs as a chambermaid until discovered by German art dealer Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur.) The film is about their shared passion for art and their long-term collaboration despite the intervention of a little conflict known as World War I. This well-acted and engaging though deliberately paced film shows us both the happenstance of being a successful artist and how creative genius teeters on a knife-edge with madness.

Whatever Works is a comprehensive Woody Allen film without Woody. I call this film a comprehensive Woody Allen film because the film’s raison d’être is to fully impart Woody’s worldview and life philosophy. Larry David takes the Woody Allen role and gives it a considerably more curmudgeonly bite than whining Woody has usually mustered. David spends a fair amount of the film directly addressing the film audience. While these direct addresses can seem a bit preachy, there is a conspiratorial intimacy between David and the audience as we share the awareness that we are watching him in a movie. Probably full enjoyment of this film is dependent on whether one understands and appreciates Woody’s secular and moral relativist perspective. I do.

Are you a Michelle Pfeiffer fan? If you are, you are in for a bit of a treat. She appears in Chéri in all her glory, and for a woman aged fifty-one this is absolutely glorious indeed. One might think that she would be the title character, but one needs to recall one’s high school French to recall how masculine and feminine are denoted. Chéri is masculine and is the name of Lea de Lonval’s (Pfeiffer) much younger lover (Rupert Friend). The film is based on a book by Colette, and Lea is an aging courtesan. She has become prosperous servicing the sexual needs of the wealthy and powerful in nineteenth-century Paris, yet the unseemly nature of her profession has always kept her on the periphery of social acceptance. In the twilight years of her beauty she has become the guardian and then the lover of the beautiful Cheri, the wayward bored son of one of her fellow courtesans, until his mother finds a socially acceptable match for him. The film is basically a tossed salad of overwrought melodrama and stylishly bawdy comedy in this nineteenth-century Parisian version of Sex and the City. One may, however, need to accord Sex and the City greater respect as they have run through several years on HBO, one big screen rendition, and are planning a second. Stephen Frears’s movie has its moments, but then it just runs out of gas and stops. If one appreciates Ms. Pfeiffer’s beauty—and I do—then it’s worth renting.

The Hurt Locker is a powerful film that reveals truths about war and the very difficult business of soldiering. Multiple filmmakers have tried to make the definitive film about the Iraq War, and most have failed—sometimes nobly and sometimes less so—because their eagerness to make a political statement got in the way of cinematic storytelling. This film neither lauds nor loathes the decision to invade Iraq. The Hurt Locker simply takes the audience into the world of the soldiers serving in Iraq. The soldiers featured have a very dangerous job: defusing improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The film shows how the intensity of daily life-and-death situations and the essential camaraderie affects soldiers, their relationships with each other, and their relationships with those they left at home. While there are several elements of the action that are clearly specific to Iraq, much of the film’s action and themes could apply to any military conflict.

Sam Rockwell gives a fantastic performance in Duncan Jones’s sci-fi drama Moon. Rockwell’s performance as Sam Bell nearly rivals Tom Hanks’s performance in Castaway as far as having a single actor generate all of the film’s dramatic energy. Bell is all by himself mining raw materials from the moon. He is doing a three-year stretch. His only companion is the computer (voiced by Kevin Spacey) that controls his environment and provides his link to Earth. Through the computer he interacts with his employers and with his wife. An accident creates the need to restaff the mining outpost before Sam’s full three-year stint is up, and suddenly the mining station has two Sam Bells. Rockwell is tremendous acting alone, acting opposite himself, and opposite the computer. He draws us into this bizarre futuristic Orwellian tale and makes us feel his character’s loneliness and sense of betrayal. This is a hidden gem worth seeking out.   

(500) Hundred Days of Summer was Marc Webb’s auspicious feature film debut. The film is a comedic take on love and was well poised to please summer moviegoers looking for something different from the blockbuster action-adventure special effects orgies. Though the film has been described as a romantic comedy—albeit an offbeat one—it really is a comedy about romance. The film reverses the gender polarity of the typical film romance, casting Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a young man looking for a heaven-sent soul mate and Zooey Deschanel as a young lady with lower expectations and knowledge of the bus schedule as in “there’s always another (guy/girl) coming around.”  Summer is the young lady, and their relationship lasts 500 days, of which the film cherry-picks a few days for high (or low) lights. The film features some entertainingly goofy moments that seem pretty standard for romantic comedies, but the focus is really on how the two perspectives on love are discussed and worked out between the lead characters. Many filmgoers absolutely loved this film for its honest portrayal of the lifecycle of a romance, but I felt that were some plot links missing to make the germination of Tom’s (Gordon-Levitt) vocational ambition seem earned and to explain or avoid the outright abandonment of Tom’s younger sister Rachel (Chloe Moretz) as a key member of his emotional support system after she was used in the intriguing opening. Still the film offers some smart insight on relationships, and the actors are fully committed to making it work.

The surprise winner of this year’s Foreign-language Oscar was director Yôjirô Takita’s Departures (original title: Okuribito). The film debuted at the 2008 Montreal World Film Festival where it collected the Official Competition’s Grand Prix des Amériques before going on to collect another twenty-nine mantelpiece decorations as well as the Oscar. The film has, of course, a misleading title that plays into the film’s story. Laid-off cellist Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) responds to an ad placed by Ikuei Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), offering work on “departures,” to find himself performing ritual cleansing and dressing of the recently departed. Dealing with dead bodies is held in the same high regard in Japan as it is in the United States. Despite his own initial revulsion and pressure from his wife and friends to quit, Daigo becomes proficient at his new job and—more important—convinced of the essential service he performs for the deceased and their families. The film is a deliberate, gentle, thoughtful, and sometimes humorous look at relationships, loss, grieving, and the comfort provided through ritual. This is a special film that offers wisdom and compassion for those universal moments of profound bereavement. It probably won’t be the film that everyone is anxious to see, but it will prove very rewarding for those who give it a chance.

I usually wouldn’t write a review of a film that I fell asleep while watching as I did with Sophie Barthes’s Cold Souls. This isn’t especially fair to the film, and sometimes falling asleep says a lot more about me and whether I am properly ready to see a film than about the film being seen. However, this time I’m not so sure. Cold Souls is a dark comedy about the nature of the soul and the supposedly burgeoning business of soul trafficking. Despite these potentially fascinating subjects, the insertion of a tongue firmly in some cheek or other, and the presence of two of my favorite actors in Paul Giamatti and David Strathairn, the film’s amusement comes only intermittently, much too infrequently, and definitely too far apart to sustain viewer interest. Cold is part of the title, and it aptly describes the film’s emotional temperature. Unfortunately, cool—sometimes frigid—characters don’t generate a lot audience involvement, and the glacial pacing adds to the soporific effect. My wife and I saw this film with another cinephile couple. All four of us admitted to falling asleep during the film. I think that says more about the film than about any one individual’s sleep deprivation.      

Does the name Neill Blomkamp mean anything to you? How about Sharlto Copley?  How about Peter Jackson? The first two are the director and star of District 9 and Jackson—the one name you may have recognized—served as a producer. Jackson’s affiliation probably opened some doors for this otherwise no-name film. That got the film booked into theaters, but $100+ million in U.S. box office and approaching $200 million worldwide greenlights a sequel and gets some name recognition for unknowns like Blomkamp and Copley. The film begins as a faux documentary about an unsightly race of insectlike aliens from a spaceship that seems to have done the space travel equivalent of running aground over Johannesburg, South Africa. The aliens—derided as “prawns”—have been confined to the ghettolike District 9, and the film’s action begins on the day the despised prawns are to be moved to a new site since the District 9 real estate now has more valuable uses. The move is being led by Wikus Van De Merwe (Copley), whose primary qualification for leadership is his marriage to the boss’s daughter. The story abruptly changes when Wikus gets soaked with prawn body fluid and begins to metamorphose into a prawn’s body. Despite Wikus’s employer seeing a plus side to this— the impressive arsenal of prawn weaponry can only be operated by those with the appropriate prawn tissue markers—Wikus just wants his life with his wife and children back. Suddenly Wikus goes from hunting prawns to being hunted, and his only allies are prawns trying to bring their derelict spaceship back to life. The film delivers an impressive diet of action sequences and special effects liberally laced with brutal violence, but it also makes us take a hard look at how we view “the other”—those who we perceive as different from ourselves—even if it portrays Nigerians so nastily that the Nigerian government has called for banning the film. My wife might agree, though not necessarily in solidarity with the maligned Nigerians, but I enjoyed (like millions of other filmgoers) the films clever linkage of imaginative action adventure with trenchant social commentary.

My wife and I have been fans of author Jodi Picoult ever since we came across one of her books about ten or eleven years ago at the Dartmouth Bookstore and realized she lived just a town or two away from where we were. My Sister’s Keeper is the first of her novels to be made into a feature film though three other books have been adapted as television movies. The story is inspired by the attempts by families to preserve the life of a sick child by having another child or children who may be able to provide the appropriately genetically matched tissues for transplant to a sick older sibling. Picoult’s story poses an interesting question: What if the donor sibling says “no,” and then she goes to court to back that up?  Nick Cassavetes and Jeremy Leven have written the screenplay, and Cassavetes directed the film. A strong cast has been assembled including Sofia Vassilieva (TV’s Medium) as the ill sister Katie; Abigail Breslin (Little Miss Sunshine) as the healthy tissue-donating sister Anna; Cameron Diaz as the desperate mother determined to keep Katie alive; and Alec Baldwin as Anna’s attorney. This is an engaging and thought-provoking film about a situation—the serious illness and potential loss of a child—that no one would want to confront. The film does an excellent job in taking us inside the world confronted by a family chronically in crisis due to the daughter’s illness. While the film could easily become hopelessly maudlin, the characters portray a humanity that never loses its dignity and keeps trying to pursue happiness despite the obstacles. However, it is likely that many in the audience may develop a nagging suspicion that there is something missing that makes the big twist seem a bit anticlimactic. Still, I was drawn in and I cared about what happened to this family.

I usually don’t seek out horror-thriller films like Orphan, but I somehow found myself intrigued by the film and convinced my wife to see it, appealing to her interest in deafness as one (Aryana Engineer) of the child actors was deaf. My wife works in rehabilitation—specifically providing services for the deaf—and the reviews suggested that her disability played a key role in the film. The film did incorporate young Miss Engineer’s deafness into the story, but it was not significant in the film’s resolution. This film is a cautionary tale where instead of having an affair as in Fatal Attraction, the imprudent act that creates the jeopardy is to adopt an older child from Russia without trying to learn all one can about the child’s background. While the film is fairly engaging, it does follow relatively familiar plot developments and will ask the audience to overlook a few less than credible aspects of the story. Though well executed by actors Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, and CCH Pounder, the film is definitely a paint-by-numbers affair. However, the big discovery for me was the young actress Isabelle Fuhrman. While many other child actors have roles that require that they just be cute and adorable or project a limited palette of emotions such as disappointment or fear or meanness, Miss Fuhrman—as the title character and linchpin of the film—has to be appealing, threatening, and, finally, seductive. Her acting requires her to project a broad range of emotions and even has scenes where her character is clearly acting so as to manipulate her adoptive parents. This is tricky territory for an actor to negotiate when the actor’s character is also “acting.” This is a lot to place on the twelve-year-old shoulders of a young girl, but she delivers an outstanding performance. This raises the grade an extra half a star.

It is well known that Quentin Tarantino worked in a video store prior to becoming established as a film director. Clearly, he has great affection for low-budget genre films that showed in drive-ins and off-the-beaten-path movie theaters before finding places on shelves in the back aisles of video stores. He seems to have wanted to apply his not inconsiderable skills backed by more generous budgets and A-list actors into remaking these fifth-rate cinematic productions into quality films. Alas, sometimes one cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, no matter how skillful the craftsmen and no matter how much one invests in the effort. Tarantino, however, seems to have had somewhat higher aspirations with his World War II epic Inglourious Basterds. His film vaguely resembles Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen, which may have provided inspiration. Brad Pitt has the Lee Marvin role as the commander of a special squad doing their best to cut a bloody swath through Nazi-occupied France. However, instead of death-row reprobates, Pitt’s squad is made up exclusively of Jews. Their mission is not just to attack standard-issue military targets, but also to wipe out the Nazi elite, including der Fuhrer at the Paris premiere of Goebbels’s latest propaganda opus. While Tarantino skillfully switches perspectives, ratchets the tension up and down, and keeps the film inexorably marching toward its fiery conclusion, he introduces us to an unforgettable villain in Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz). Landa is a courteous and clever opportunist. His viciousness is motivated not by national allegiance or true belief in the Nazi creed, but by naked self-interest. This is a double-edged sword, making his loyalty negotiable on the one hand, while also making his atrocities the calculated moves of a careerist. The film ultimately turns into a Revenge of the Jews fable, but Tarantino bleeds glory out of the war film by revealing that the fundamental goal of warfare is to kill the enemy, that collateral damage kills innocent people, that evil can wear a friendly smile, and that Faustian bargains have often been made allowing evil-doers to go unpunished. The film offers many delights, but its truths about war are not among them.

I can’t remember if it was a truly hot summer evening when we went to see Bandslam. There are a handful of movies that we see every summer due to some combination of curiosity and pursuit of an air-conditioned environment. I do recall that I was definitely curious about seeing writer (with Josh A. Cagan) and director Todd Graff’s follow-up to his intriguing 2002 film Camp. Although Camp’s title doesn’t announce this like Bandslam, both are films about music. Will Burton (Gaelan Connell) is a dweebish new kid in town struggling (like most adolescents, including this middle-aged adolescence survivor) to find his niche and be accepted in the local teen milieu. He has a passionate interest in rock music from the 1970s and has an ear for what sounds good. His life takes a strange turn when popular high school hottie Charlotte Banks (Aly Michalka) suddenly takes command and makes him part of her personal betterment project. Though there’s a somewhat crude term that comes to mind for males submitting to the female will, Charlotte does recognize his creative gift and finds an outlet for it. Soon Will is putting together a band from an assortment of unlikely teenaged odds and ends to take on Charlotte’s old band—headed by her handsome and arrogant former boyfriend Ben Wheatley (Scott Porter)—as well as a number of others. Though Will is clearly smitten by Charlotte’s blond radiance, his friendship with a brunette loner (Vanessa Hudgens) seems a closer kinship. The resolution requires that a not so hidden talent be revealed and Will’s romantic and musical stars align. This is a cute summer confection that clearly got overlooked in the summer cinematic bakery. It has some interesting storylines and several intriguing characters, but the film doesn’t have the same kind of edginess that made Camp so appealing nor is it at all unpredictable. Still, it does have some wonderful music, and the two female leads are very easy on the eyes. If you are looking for a light entertaining film to while away an afternoon or evening, this is definitely worth a rental.

One of the staples of summer movies is the comedy genre of “boys and girls behaving badly.” These are the films about things like competitive deflowering of virgins; becoming freelance drug dealers after “finding” a suitcase full of cocaine; becoming a prostitute in order to have a really interesting “What I did on My Summer Vacation” composition; going joyriding in the neighborhood mobster’s Lamborghini; and those carefree, irresponsible allegedly adult party animals who suddenly find themselves locked into the ball-and-chain of actually having to reluctantly be responsible for one or more cute little urchins. These types of movies have a pretty dumb set-up, dumber characters, and some of the dumbest dialogue going. They mostly offer mindless entertainment, but that may be exactly what some filmgoers are seeking. The Hangover looks like a prime example of this genre, but manages to find a way to get its male leads into a very bizarre situation in a way that makes perfect sense. The film is about a wild Las Vegas bachelor party after which the attendees can’t remember what happened or where they misplaced the groom. This is a guilty pleasure because our boys have been very naughty indeed, but they are absolutely desperate to set things right. Even as the situations become ever more complicated and bizarre, screenwriters Jon Lucas and Scott Moore have made the sequence of events flow with its own certain logic. Todd Phillips’s film is hilariously entertaining and never seems just plain dumb. This is not for everyone, but those with a fair level of tolerance for raunchiness will have a great time.