Robert Redford's The Conspirator tells a true, and potentially great, story: In 1865, three men and one woman were hanged for their involvement in Lincoln's assassination. The woman was Mary Surratt, who ran the Washington, D.C. boarding house where the plot was hatched; her son, John, was also wanted in connection with the assassination, but he remained in hiding while his mother stood trial in a military court. The historical evidence suggests that Surratt may have been innocent but refused to save herself at the expense of her son's life; that evidence also suggests -- at least insofar as Redford presents it -- that her trial was anything but fair.
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Bodies drop around Sonia (Ksenia Rappoport) from the first scene of The Double Hour, Giuseppe Capotondi's elliptical neo-noir. Whether she's being stalked by death or is herself the tall, dark stranger is a question that emerges slowly, developing like a crime scene photograph in a closed room just beyond the frame. A hotel maid six months on the job in Turin, Italy, Sonia rarely smiles and barely flinches when she discovers the suicide of a guest. Cool-blooded by nature or numbed from the outside in?
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The other day I was thumbing through my "Glowering Vixens of Party of Five" multiyear calendar when I realized something: I know just the mediocre slasher to prepare you for Scream 4! Or Scre4m! Or SCRE4M! Or Justin Bieber: Always Say Neve. It's I Know What You Did Last Summer, screenwriter Kevin Williamson's followup to Scream that abandoned wit, subversion, and scares, and replaced them with a slow-ass murderer in a denim Eddie Bauer jacket. Fine, that's terrifying.
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Soul Surfer is based on a true story, that of pro surfer Bethany Hamilton who, as a young teenager, lost her arm to a hungry, aggressive shark. So you'd think that the movie's director, Sean McNamara, would move in for the kill, dramatically speaking, in the big shark-attack scene, with lots of screaming, chaos and shaky-cam stuff. Not by a long shot. Soul Surfer is the kind of sturdy, satisfying family drama that doesn't get made very often anymore. But even beyond that, at crucial moments it shows there's actually a brain behind the camera. If only more pictures -- made on any budget -- could be that way.
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Who would ever have thought that Robert Ludlum would have become the father of modern action cinema? The ruthless 2002 film adaptation of his novel The Bourne Identity -- with the hero trying to figure who or what he (or she is), while amassing a body count that warrants coverage on CNN -- is now the genre standard, and in this year alone, we've seen a number of variations on that theme. The most recent is director Joe Wright's efficient and soulful Hanna, in which the title character (played by Saorise Ronan), a pale-skinned teenager with matching sandalwood hair and eyebrows, has mastered the art of contained chaos.
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A medieval genre goof of impressive physical scale and disproportionately modest comic ambitions, as an entertainment animal, Your Highness is disappointing where it counts. All talk, you might say. Hung like a gerbil? Conceived and co-written by Eastbound and Down star Danny McBride, the film gets so involved in crafting bigger and badder dick jokes (eventually one literally hangs around McBride's neck) that it loses sight of the serious business of making us laugh.
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There's a great laugh for heist movie fans in the low-wattage comedy Henry's Crime, when ex-con Henry (Keanu Reeves) -- who has just finished doing a year in the joint -- returns to visit Max (James Caan), who's doing life.
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Those of you who don't want to know how Jason Winer's Arthur remake ends should take this opportunity to step over to the liquor cabinet and mix yourself a good, stiff drink -- if you plan on seeing this godforsaken thing, you'll need it. As for the rest of you: In the 2011 Arthur, the lovable, unrepentant, richer-than-Trump drunk originally played by Dudley Moore has morphed, for the worse, into Russell Brand. After shedding his scheming fiancee, losing the parental figure who raised him, and messing things up with the Queens cutie who represents his one chance at true love, happy-go-lucky Arthur realizes he's genuinely lost. Instead of solving the problem by dashing off with his beloved in an expensive vintage car, Arthur enters AA, where, with his earnest testimony, he crushes the movie's last dim twinkle of comic spirit, which was pretty puny in the first place.
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Truly confident movies are rarely flashy ones, which is why filmmakers who really know what they're doing -- whether they're working in the mainstream or in Hollywood -- don't always get their due. Kelly Reichardt's pioneer drama Meek's Cutoff is such a quiet, unassuming picture that it isn't immediately obvious how surefooted it is. For one thing, it's set along the Oregon Trail in 1845, and it features actresses who are normally rather glamorous-looking (most notably Michelle Williams) decked out in calico and sunbonnets: If that doesn't sound like a reason to head for the hills, I don't know what is.
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What do you say about the film that says it all? How can words add anything to this towering cinematic fortress of prestige? Is it wrong to "describe" senselessness? I'm a valiant first-time viewer of Tommy Wiseau's 2003 dada vortex, and I'm going to attempt to convey the whimsical hemorrhage I just experienced. Spoiler: I ain't Jill Bolte Taylor, and I won't succeed at this feat. Here's to a good effort. (NSFW!)
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In Blank City, a discursive oral history of New York's DIY film scene in the late 1970s and 1980s, Lydia Lunch says she doesn't the mind the "No Wave" moniker coined to describe the work she and her friends were doing. "We need to have a category in which to define movements, I guess," she says. "I have no problem with 'No Wave,' because it says No Wave. So again, it's defined by what it isn't. What is it? I don't fucking know."
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Trust is the rare film that feels longer than its 106 minutes without having exceeded its narrative limits or strained the viewer's patience. Patience is one of the few things director David Schwimmer doesn't test, in fact, over the course of a story that seems to span a lifetime and a few scenes that stop time altogether. An indelibly rendered portrait of what lives behind a "News At 11" headline, Trust explores the various boundaries -- at home, online, and within the psyche -- sent into flux when a young girl reaches adolescence, and what can happen when the resulting vulnerabilities are exploited.
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The ads for Hop tout it as the new picture from the creators of Despicable Me; what they really mean is that it's from the director of Alvin and the Chipmunks and Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. That would be Tim Hill, and his work in has none of the special charms of Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud's cheerfully disreputable concoction. Hop features no misanthropic baldies, no dead-guy pancakes, no cradles made of discarded missiles. All we get is a runaway rabbit and a grown-up who's too lazy to get a real job. Talk about bait-and-switch.
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Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier's In a Better World raises a number of intriguing questions about the true meaning of masculinity, about how kids view their parents, about the necessity of knowing when it's not a good thing to turn the other cheek. But too many of these ideas simply hang in the air, like fruit that can't decide whether it's ripe or not. In a Better World won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture, and at the very least, it's a tight piece of craftsmanship. But it's at once too polished and vaguely unfinished, and its final act of forgiveness demands a huge leap on the part of the audience. The movie isn't just looking toward a better world; it has way too much faith in an unrealistically perfect one.
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Writer-director James Gunn's Super is the white-guy version of the Damon Wayans superhero caper Blankman -- or, perhaps more specifically, Generation X's take on Kick Ass. Not Matthew Vaughn's film adaptation, either, but Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.'s original comic, with its gamy, emo desperation about a regular guy who decides to fight crime. And, like the comic version of Kick Ass, the action in Super is clumsy and triggers cringe-producing consequences that make you wonder about the sanity of its protagonist.
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