reviews

Donaldson and screenwriter David Self keep a tight focus on a few offices and conference rooms in the Kennedy White House and the Pentagon to relate the chilling and surprisingly suspenseful story of a few days in which war as it was previously known ceased to exist, replaced by a new kind of combat employing the weapons of international politics and diplomacy.

Tobacco farmers and liquor manufacturers get subsidies. Marijuana growers and cocaine smugglers get arrested. If the hypocrisy of the ‘war on drugs’ infuriates you, then you’ll end up with a feeling of smug satisfaction after Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s stark and unflinching depiction of both the naive cluelessness and outright pretense that characterizes drug warriors from local cops and the DEA right on up to federal judges and national politicians.

You Can Count on Me should never have been made, but thank the gods The Shooting Gallery — which also brings us its self-titled film series of way-below-the-radar indies — took a chance with it. We need more films like this one to remind us that movies aren’t always supposed to be about being big and bad and loud, but also about being fragile and quiet and observant of the tiny details and emotions that make up a human life.

You know those people who have no capacity whatsoever to form memories, so that they have to keep a daily diary just to remind themselves what they did yesterday? That’s the audience Finding Forrester is shooting for. It’s a small demographic, of course, but it’s nice to see filmmakers eschewing the Hollywood blockbuster thing and aiming for a niche crowd.

If A Simple Plan was Sam Raimi’s Northern gothic, then The Gift is his Southern gothic. Beautiful in its spareness and simplicity, it spins a chill-inducing tale from a seemingly mundane story by mixing in supernatural elements and treating them with a refreshing down-to-earthness.

It’s a story oft told: the star-crossed lovers separated by circumstance, but rarely has it been related so dramatically as in Im Kwon Taek’s Chunhyang. Combining the theatrical and the cinematic, Im draws on ancient Korean operatic traditions while utilizing some of the lushest, most gorgeous cinematography this year to create a film that is poetic and lyrical, both visually and aurally. If only it were as engaging of the emotions as it is the senses.

The House of Mirth — based on the Edith Wharton novel and written for the screen and directed by Terence Davies — is a strikingly beautiful film about the discreet ugliness that characterized proper society at the beginning of the twentieth century, and how petty inhumanity set women up, almost inevitably, for ruination.