2007 theatrical releases

This is a smart, elegant, sophisticated film that should be everything I want to see in a movie and yet fails to be because it’s missing that one enigmatic element, the hardest to capture, the most unfakeable: spirit.

Big scary black man keepin’ the little blonde white girl in chains? Oh *my.*

So this is the big question, then: Are so many American men so oppressed by the “horrors” of modern life — high cholesterol, uppity wives, smartass children, cell phones, boring jobs, the general dead-eyed awfulness of suburbia — that they need a stupid movie like this one to tell them that if they don’t like their lives they should do something about it?

To say that they don’t make movies like this anymore — splendidly, quietly angry in a folksy, old-fashioned kind of way — is to prove its point…

There’s not a lick of dialogue for maybe the first 15 minutes of this daring action Western… unless moans of pain count as dialogue.

Twenty-three reversed is 32, and 3 minus 2 is 1, which how many stars I’d give ‘The Number 23’ if I gave stars, which I don’t. And that one star is dedicated purely to Jim Carrey and his rangy, ragged, totally fascinating performance as an actor on the precipice of his career– I mean, a man on the precipice of madness.

If you’re like most people, you’ve been asking yourself for several years now, ‘Just who the hell is Sienna Miller, why is she famous, and why must I endure the latest gossip about her?’

Oh, devastating, *devastating* and lovely and bittersweet and entirely wonderful, this enchantingly old-fashioned movie about the power of friendship and imagination and art and learning and expanding one’s horizons.

This is one smart thriller: it lets you draw your own conclusions, assumes you’re connected enough to current events to understand the context in which it occurs — no, actually, it *requires* that you’re connected in order to get the full brunt of the anxiety and dread bubbling under its surface.