 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
ANDREW COOPER / MIRAMAX |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
T H E A V I A T O R
Director Martin Scorsese soars triumphantly close to the sun, and unlike Icarus, never falters in his flight. An epically scaled biography of Howard Hughes, the mad genius of airplanes, movies and womanizing, this is filmmaking on a grand, rare, often curiously poignant scale, featuring a stunning performance by Leonardo DeCaprio as one of the great American nut cases. In an era when the better American directors are making chamber pieces, Scorsese dares the symphonic, with deeply satisfying results.
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
M I L L I O N D O L L A R B A B Y
It starts as a comedy of frustration—Hillary Swank plays an aspiring but no more than promising female boxer—proceeds to triumph—she gets her title shot—and ends in an unexpected tragedy. Director Clint Eastwood plays her manager, Morgan Freeman her corner man, and both match Swank's unimprovable performance. Some artists, as they age, strip their work down to a few very powerful essentials—austerity of means, direct and potent emotional honesty—and Eastwood here joins that rare company. |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
V E R A D R A K E
Imelda Staunton gives what is probably the greatest female performance of the year as a sweet-souled abortionist in 1950s England, offering tea and sympathy along with her strictly illegal (and unpaid) services to young women "in trouble." The law sees her otherwise, and her encounter with it breaks her spirit and our hearts. Writer-director Mike Leigh's bluntly realistic style has never been more aptly applied than it is in a story that is rich in the faintly comic, strangely touching details of lower-class English life in an era rife with hypocrisy.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
T H E I N H E R I T A N C E
When we meet Christopher (Ulrich Thomsen) he has escaped his family's dour destiny. Not for him running its grim steel mill; he owns a restaurant and loves a pretty actress in Stockholm. Then his father's suicide forces him to return to the factory. And we watch helplessly as a good man turns into a moral monster. There are hints of Bergman in Danish director Per Fly's novelistically-developed, classically-realized, and utterly absorbing film. |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
K I T C H E N S T O R I E S
Social science runs gently amuck as Swedish efficiency experts invade the kitchens of Norwegian bachelor farmers. The time and motion studies the experts conduct are supposed to make it easier for the old guys to cook their dinners. But when one of the experts violates the rules by talking to one of his subjects, a very tender, sweetly comic relationship begins to develop in Lars Hamer's dry, delicate and deliciously deadpan film. The experiment, of course, goes south, but the film very honorably fulfills our hopes—so often crudely travestied—for humane but rigorously unsentimental movie-making.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
C O L L A T E R A L
All right, hired killers don't normally flag a cab to transport them from one dark deed to the next. But once you get over that improbability, Michael Mann's elegantly shot thriller is the best of its breed this year, featuring a fine, comically terrorized performance by Jamie Foxx as the cabbie, Tom Cruise as the implacably ironic hit man and the city of Los Angeles in all its dark, neo-noir splendor as the setting for their deadly encounter. Technical note: the film was largely shot in a digital format and, guess what, the difference between pixels and film stock is not visible to the bedazzled eye.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
M A R I A , F U L L O F G R A C E
A young Colombian woman tries to escape a dead-end life by becoming a mule for drug smugglers. It is a harrowing way to make your way out of poverty, and an equally difficult way of discovering that you are a better person than you think you are. But the heart-breakingly beautiful Catalina Sandino Moreno as the title character is up for the task. Her performance goes beyond art to artlessness—this is acting as behavior—and is emblematic of writer-director Joshua Marston's straightforward, unsentimental tale moving from darkness into the light of... well, yes, goodness and grace.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
K I N S E Y
Alfred Kinsey liked counting things, beginning with Gall Wasps and ending with orgasms. Liam Neeson plays him (very well) as a hopeless '50s square scandalizing America with his censuses of human sexuality. In this new era of red-state censoriousness it is good to have him back, in writer-director Bill Condon's sober, modest movie, insisting that, statistically speaking, we're sexually wilder than we like to let on. And that there's nothing abnormal about our randiness. Laura Linney, incidentally, gives a lovely performance as Kinsey's patient, put-upon wife.
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
T H E W O O D S M A N
The Woodsman asks this question: Can a man convicted of that most heinous of crimes, child molestation, pay his debt to society and resume a normal life? Director (and co-writer) Nicole Kessell doesn't make it easy for Kevin Bacon's Walter, who continues to fight his old temptation. But Bacon, a splendidly unfancy actor, gives a great, austere and ultimately winning performance. Kyra Sedgwick is equally good as the tough-minded woman who comes to believe in him. And this tight, tense, minimalist movie constitutes an impressive debut for first time director Kessell. |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
S I D E W A Y S
A nerdy oenophile (Paul Giamatti) and his feckless actor pal (Thomas Haden Church) take a leisurely drive through California's wine country on the weekend before the latter's wedding. Along the way, they encounter life, principally in the form of two wise, sexy women (Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh), and emerge from their excellent adventure in a state something like adulthood. Director Alexander Payne's movie is a very small pleasure, but an authentic one. This may be the year's most easily-lovable movie.
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
E T E R N A L S U N S H I N E O F T H E S P O T L E S S M I N D
a n d
I ♥ H U C K A B E E S
There's always plenty of pretentious piffle among any year's releases, but 2004 produced a bumper crop of nonsense. We have space (and patience) for just two items: Director Michel Gondry's production of yet another fatuous script by Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and David O. Russell's I ♥ Huckabees. The former is about how you have to lose love in order to find it. The latter is about losing and finding your identity. But both explore these favorite sophomoric topics through complex comical devices more amusing, apparently, to their creators than they possibly can be to any reasonable person who happens to find himself in the audience. |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
