This film is not about war per se, nor does it even remotely dwell on what the morality of a war in Iran might involve. Rather, it merely takes a hypothetical Iranian confrontation as its provocative starting point for examining the nature of duty, conscience, and the pursuit of happiness. At that level, the film works decently. The characters are all written distinctly enough that their dilemmas never boil down to expressions of groupthink, and Chris Klein is particularly good in bringing some real depth to George’s varied conflicts of interest.

Woody Allen is in very familiar territory with this dead-serious (even overly serious) tragedy, mining many of the same philosophical veins as he did in Crimes and Misdemeanors about twenty years ago. This time, though, his emphasis is on the weaknesses of familial loyalty. But it’s hard for me to care much about what happens to these guys. And it’s very hard for me to find much of their predicament believable at all. On this score, Cassandra’s Dream is deeply inferior to Crimes and Misdemeanors—which also included a significant dose of the kind of black humor this film sorely misses. Effort alone can’t keep Cassandra’s Dream from being little more than a boat adrift on the water—one missing any kind of moral or dramatic anchor.

The basic story of The Bucket List is interesting, and the characters are compelling enough (thanks to strong, if slightly sketchy, work by Morgan Freeman as Chambers and Jack Nicholson as Cole). Still, the story seems a little too simple at times, and frequently amounts to a great deal of talking and very little action. And because we know someone’s got to die, the story has got to keep us guessing about who and when. Frankly, the script’s structure ends up feeling like a cheat. I was relieved, however, that director Rob Reiner did not venture down the Grumpy Dying Men path.

The movie doesn’t, in fact, feature Larry, Pa, and Lunt at all. It features three characters played by Larry, Pa, and Lunt. And get this: these three misfits aren’t pirates at all, they’re grunts who work at a Florida pirate-themed dinner show. What’s really missing here, for the film’s older audience, is any kind of recognition of the characters created in Mike Nawrocki’s original Silly Song. The other thing that’s noticeably missing is the manic energy that Nawrocki’s nutty short films always generated. Still, that’s an adult’s perspective and a critic’s perspective. Kids don’t often pay attention to either, while I suspect they will pay attention to Larry the Cucumber all morning long.

Okay, I’ll admit that this film is broadly formulaic and full of stereotypes; but David E. Talbert (director, screenwriter, and among the producers) has plenty of talent and deserves recognition and attention for it. First Sunday is genuinely honest, at moments vastly amusing, and finally, delivers on not just one theme, but several. Overarching and tying the whole business together are the themes of forgiveness and redemption; and although on paper it sounds sappy, Talbert writes it and directs it in such a way that it works and leaves the viewer with no sense of being manipulated. The audience I screened the film with was diverse—and it generally seemed to work across the board.

“Intimidation is not something I think about a lot,” says the director of the upcoming independent release Day Zero. “If you’re thinking of intimidation, then you’re not going to take those first steps. If you believe in yourself, and if you believe you’ve got something to learn in the process, and if you can put it together in a way where you can bring people into a theater or cinema and say, Check this out; I think you’ll enjoy it, and I think it will maybe spark some dialogue, and maybe you’ll think a little differently or consider something that you hadn’t thought of before—that’s why you do it.”

He Was A Quiet Man is a clever take on the detachment we have with our neighbors. “He was a quiet man.” “He seemed like a nice guy.” So let me get this straight. Since he seemed like a nice guy, we should just leave him alone and assume he is not someone we should mingle with. If, of course, he were a bad dude, we would stay away from him anyway. So he ends up a loser either way, thanks to us. The film is an expose on how we treat others. The dark comedy is biting, clever, and more than a little convicting.

Director Paul Anderson is never one to be boxed in. This time out, he departs from his usual depictions of the fringe of American suburban life and journeys into the white-hot center of one oil-man’s soul. And it is as black as the oil he mines.
Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis create in Daniel Plainview not a hero, but a study in human narcissistic cruelty. Day-Lewis, with his phenomenal talent honed to its very best, makes Plainview a realistic person and not just a caricature. As with Michael Corleone in The Godfather, nothing and no one in Plainview’s life can bring him out of his self-created darkness.

Don’t allow anyone to tell you the plot or where the “surprises” come. You will not enjoy the movie if you know all the answers before you go. Juan Antonio Bayona has a masterful eye for shooting interiors and exteriors and he couldn’t have chosen more beautiful parts of Spain in which to craft this film. The cast of The Orphanage is fabulous, too, but the standout is Belen Rueda as Laura. The camera loves her. Finally, there is plenty of jumpy stuff for the adrenaline junkie or horror flick aficionado. Bayona is a diabolical master of the exquisitely, almost physically painful (and definitely psychically excruciating) build-up of tension.

Vischer is not expecting next week’s Veggie Tales movie to restore the purity of his ministry. “You know, it’s a story I wrote before the meltdown,” he says, “that got picked up by the new owners and put into production. Am I happy that it’s being made? Yes. Do I think that it restores Veggie Tales in some way as a pure Christian ministry again? Well, no. It doesn’t actually change anything. But it’s a story that I like, so I hope the story gets out. I have no idea what kind of impact it will have on Veggie Tales as a property; I just hope that people enjoy the film.”