2006 theatrical releases

Though the film intrigues me intellectually, it doesn’t make me feel anything: and movies for me are primarily emotional experiences. By that measure, ‘The Fountain’ fails for me. But it’s one of the more interesting cinematic failures I’ve ever seen.

You’ve probably heard more about *Venus* than its limited, under-the-radar release would seem to have warranted. It’s the movie that earned star Peter O’Toole his eighth Academy Award nomination. It’s the movie about a May-December romance between a dirty old man and a tough twentysomething chick. It’s a celebration of old age; it’s a vindication of spunky youth; it’s this; it’s that.

It had me at hello, did the surburban satire *Little Children,* and kept me for a long time, and then lost me in its final moments. If ever that dictum about an ending making or breaking a film were true, it’s here — I can’t remember the last time my impression of a movie was so dramatically altered by how it wrapped up.

Okay, let’s be clear: it’s the impact of this death on a range of *women* that Moncrieff is concerned with, the kind of women whose stories are also typically untold, unheard, ignored.

Holy ruby slippers, is this one grim film. Enthrallingly spooky, appropriately frightful, but grim. Grim like it might make the Brother Grimm, “Well, it’s a bit *dark,* isn’t it?” in an accusatory tone.

Imagine ‘Single White Female’ as mounted by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and you’ve got it. Oh, snickered the critic longing for smart silliness, do I love this movie.

Watts and Norton are extraordinary actors, and in fine form here, but they never click together…

Getting lost in all the well-earned love for Whitaker is his costar, James McAvoy, the primary focus through which Whitaker’s starburst prisms into its brilliance — here is another actor who will astonish you with a very different kind of performance…

I’m not supposed to say this, as a woman, as a film critic, and particularly as a woman film critic, but I’m not a fan of Pedro Almodóvar.