Selected mini-reviews, rated on a system of 0 to 4 stars, by Rick Groen and Liam Lacey. Full reviews appeared on the dates indicated.
AUSTRALIA
**
Director Baz Luhrmann's new film is determined to put the "awe" in Australia and ends up inspiring at least as much exasperation as admiration. Nicole Kidman stars as an English aristocrat who arrives in Australia at the start of the Second World War in search of her husband, and Hugh Jackman is the rough cattle drover who comes to her aid. Quoting liberally from Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Red River and The African Queen, the film is all over the place but so eager to please that it feels like being pinned down by an overly friendly dingo and having your face licked for three hours. PG (Nov. 26) L.L.
THE CURIOUS CASE
OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
***
Daisy, an old woman, lies dying while her daughter (Julia Ormond) reads to her from a memoir by her old beau, Benjamin, a man who had the misfortune to be born old and die young. Loosely based on a fable by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has been reimagined as a special-effects-driven romantic epic. The story focuses on the relationship between Button (Brad Pitt) and Daisy (Cate Blanchett), a little girl who grows up, set against the background of the 20th century. As the Jazz Age gives way to the Second World War, and on to the Beatles, Pitt grows from a little gnome with a cracked old man's voice to an even younger and prettier version of himself. Pitt's Benjamin has an appealing Zen-master quality in the early scenes, as someone looking at life from a backward perspective. The movie itself is a bit of a curious case, in which a gifted, obsessive director, creates a film whose individual sequences are often entrancing, but serve a middle-brow whole. PG (Dec. 24) L.L.
DOUBT
***
Most film mysteries are meant to be solved, but not this one - the doubt in Doubt is nurtured. Although a certain staginess clings to John Patrick Shanley's adaptation of his own play, the mystery's interior riddle remains as tightly wound as ever, wrapped around a series of confrontational dialogues that, near-Platonic in design, pit a liberal priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) against his conservative accuser (Meryl Streep). The arguments bend one way, then the other, and, after a blistering outburst in the final scene, invite us to continue the debate when the house lights go up. Few will resist. Everyone else will leave the theatre but the movie won't leave them - this one sticks. PG (Dec. 12) R.G.
MARLEY & ME
***
A dog movie that isn't a dog of a movie - what a pleasant Christmas surprise. Starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston along with a puppy-to-aging-pooch succession of yellow Labs, the comedy has autobiographical roots in John Grogan's memoir, but, as he did with The Devil Wears Prada, director David Frankel does a pop book a real cinematic service. He uses Marley the dog not as the cutesy focal point of the story but as a kind of canine catalyst - the constant presence in a changing marriage. Yep, bring a pocket supply of tissue, because this is Old Yeller for adults. Yet bring a measure of gratitude too because, never brilliant but always solid and often wry, it's a lot better than you might think. PG (Dec. 24) R.G.
MILK
***
In the seventies, when Harvey Milk ran for public office, to be gay in public was to invite a nightstick from your local cop and a pink slip from your righteous employer. Revisiting that era, and profiling one of the cause's most visible martyrs, Gus Van Sant's film is a worthy docudrama, solid if not sublime. But, sometimes, a merely good movie can brush up against greatness, and this does so twice - in Sean Penn's magnetic performance and in the cautionary tale's contemporary resonance, in the lingering caveat that gains are reversible, and hard-won civil rights must be just as vigorously defended against renewed attacks and casual erosion. 14A (Nov. 26) R.G.
THE READER
**
Dealing with the vast issue of German collective guilt over its Nazi past, The Reader is a big-idea movie. What's more, on-camera starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, and off-screen reuniting director Stephen Daldry with writer David Hare, it boasts an array of big-time talent. Too bad all this bigness just seems so small and unfocused and simply not up to the task - intellectually scant, emotionally scant. 14A (Dec. 12) R.G.
SEVEN POUNDS
**
In keeping with the darker end of the Christmas mood, Seven Pounds opens with a man calling 911 to report his imminent suicide. But since the man is Will Smith, and he's reteaming with the same director who scaled such feel-good heights in The Pursuit of Happyness, we're not worried by this downer of a start, confident that the picture will soon, like Santa's sleigh, catch a ride on the buoyant up-drafts of sweet inspiration. And ride it does, way, way up - perhaps never before has the "spirit of giving" been pushed any higher. How high? According to my altimeter, to that oxygen-deprived point where lachrymose meets laughable. 14A (Dec. 19) R.G.
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
****
In Mumbai, an 18-year-old boy, Jamal (Dev Patel), who works as an uneducated tea server for a telephone marketing company, has become the last man standing on an Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. His improbable success has captured the imagination of the entire country but also arouses official suspicion that he is cheating. The night before the final question, the show's producer/host has the police arrest him, string him up and begin to torture him into telling the truth. Director Danny Boyle's best film since Trainspotting is essentially updated Dickens - orphans thrown into the cruel world, brother against brother, a long-delayed romance and a rags-to-riches journey - but it's also as lively as a whirling kaleidoscope. 14A (Nov. 12) L.L.
THE SPIRIT
**
What a shame that The Spirit isn't nearly as good as it looks. Shot extensively on green screen, the film, based on a 1940s adult comic, is saturated in deep blacks, greys and blues and highlighted by occasional vivid splashes of gold and crimson. With a bland hero, a hysterical villain and a surfeit of pouting vamps, including Eva Mendes, Jaime King, Paz Luna and Scarlett Johansson, Frank Miller's film feels cluttered and uninvolving. Dressed in a business-like dark suit and fedora, with a simple eye mask over his eyes and vivid red tie, the Spirit works to keep Central City safe from crime. Almost immediately, he's in a tangle with his arch-enemy, the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson), a criminal mastermind with a penchant for campy dress-up and homicidal rages. Like Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy, The Spirit focuses on an outré visual style at the expense of drama. Jackson, at least, attempts to push the temperature to a boil. The film needs all the energy he can muster. 14A (Dec. 24) L.L.
TWILIGHT
**
It's your basic boy meets girl story, at least if the basic boy happens to be a vampire and the girl is hot to take a walk on the wild side. You can imagine the complications. If not, check out this Catherine Hardwicke adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's bestseller, where you'll learn that star-fanged romance is a tricky affair indeed, and consummation is devoutly not to be wished. What's left is sometimes sensitive and often silly but really, beneath his pallor and her panting and their intertwined frustrations, it's just two long hours of coitus interruptus. PG (Nov. 21) R.G.
VALKYRIE
***
Here, wartime history and big-time Hollywood dance a precarious pas de deux. On one side, there's a decent script documenting the plot to assassinate Hitler; there's a contingent of strong British actors; and there's the efficiently suspenseful direction of Bryan Singer. On the other, there's Tom Cruise - wearing a German uniform, sporting an eye patch and clicking his shiny heels to shout " Seig Heil" in a flat American accent. But as the dance continues, with history clinging to its factual drama and Hollywood insisting on its miscast star, the two work hard to get in step. Give them credit: The result is a fairly co-ordinated effort that, despite a few miscues, yields a consistently watchable film. PG (Dec. 24) R.G.
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
***
Profound, and profoundly affecting, Ari Folman's "animated documentary" is based on actual interviews with veterans of Israel's war with Lebanon in the early eighties. Folman too is a veteran, and thus a principal figure in his own film. Indeed, it's the vast gaps in his repressed memory that motivate the interviews - they talk, he talks, and slowly the blank slate begins to fill with the bellicose sights and sounds of a horror long past. Brace yourself for the extraordinary climax, where the animation gives way to the only burst of archival footage, and in that split second, Waltz with Bashir makes us feel what few war pictures ever have - the palpable shock of the real, penetrating like a mortal blow. 18A (Dec. 26) R.G.
THE WRESTLER
***
The comeback acting performance of the year belongs to Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler. Massively pumped up to near Hulk Hogan proportions, the fiftysomething actor has created a character that's both mythically familiar and original - a trailer-park Hercules. Though there are parallels to the actor's life as a Hollywood burnout, Rourke isn't playing himself here. The performance is too disciplined to be anything else than something carefully worked out. For that, he can thank the obsessive discipline of director Darren Aronofsky, working in an austere documentary-style. Twenty years before, Randy (the Ram) Robinson was a Rocky-style folk hero, who had his most famous match against a villain called the Ayatollah, When a promoter decides to stage a 20-year anniversary rematch, Randy finds a revived sense of purpose. The humour and charisma of Rourke's outsized performance, and Aronofsky's canny, low-key direction, are a combination that's almost impossible to resist. 14A (Dec. 24) L.L.
YES MAN
**
Whether moping in his artsy flicks or manic in his jangling comedies, Jim Carrey is Hollywood's token existentialist, always mucking through a chaotic existence in search of his true essence. Yes Man puts him back in the same old quandary. Once again, Carrey lacks an identity; alas, this time, he also lacks a script. Instead, the comedy settles for a premise, flicking the binary switch and transforming Carrey's character from a major mope to the Molly Bloom of mania, saying "Yes I will yes" to every bungee-jumping, bar-brawling opportunity roaring down life's highway. Despite a few laughs, the sticking point is obvious: Once the premise is established, there's not a damn place to take it. PG (Dec. 19) R.G.
Liam Lacey