Up in the Air transforms some painful subjects into smart, sly comedy--with just enough of the pain underneath to give it some weight. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) spends most of his days traveling around the country and firing people; he's hired by bosses who don't have the nerve to do their layoffs themselves. His life of constant flight suits him--he wants no attachments.
Up in the Air transforms some painful subjects into smart, sly comedy--with just enough of the pain underneath to give it some weight. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) spends most of his days traveling around the country and firing people; he's hired by bosses who don't have the nerve to do their layoffs themselves. His life of constant flight suits him--he wants no attachments.
Like Moliere, which was released in theaters around the same time, Becoming Jane isn't a conventional biopic. Instead, Julian Jarrold (White Teeth) expands on events from Jane Austen's life that may have shaped her fiction. To his credit, he doesn't stray too far from the facts. In 1795, 20-year-old Jane (Anne Hathaway with believable British accent) is an aspiring author. Her parents (Julie Walters and James Cromwell) married for love, and money is tight. They hope to see their youngest daughter make a more lucrative match, and there's a besotted local, Mr.
When a famous person, like the nation's first openly gay male city supervisor, inspires an acclaimed book (The Mayor of Castro Street) and Oscar-winning documentary (The Times of Harvey Milk), a biopic can seem superfluous at best. Taking over from Oliver Stone and Bryan Singer, Gus Van Sant, whose previous picture was the more experimental Paranoid Park, directs with such grace, he renders the concern moot.
At the height of the 2000 election season, CBS anchor Dan Rather quipped, "The presidential race is crackling like a hickory fire." Director Jay Roach (Austin Powers) recaptures that blaze in his smart HBO docudrama about the thriller in Palm Beach County. Written by actor Danny Strong, Recount bounces between the Sunshine State, Gore's Tennessee headquarters, and Bush's Texas stomping grounds.
In a "riveting performance" (The Hollywood Reporter) that stunned critics and audiences alike, Farrah Fawcett is the heart and soul of this "edge-of-your-seat suspense drama" (The Film Journal) about a woman who turns the tables on a would-be rapist. Nominated for a Golden Globe, Fawcett "is genuine, pathetic and heroic here" (Los Angeles Times) and her "unadorned artistry singes" (Time)! After narrowly escaping an attempted rape, Marjorie (Fawcett) is haunted by the fact that her attacker (James Russo) knows where she lives.
The Hoax is a happy surprise. Surprise because, for once, having a film's release date bumped back half a year didn't mean it's a dog. Happy because Lasse Hallstrˆm's dancing-on-eggshells comedy about a notorious literary scandal of the 1970s is bounteously entertaining, with more solid laughs and certainly slyer wit than, say, the latest Will Ferrell romp. The subject is the world-shaking con an unsuccessful writer named Clifford Irving (Richard Gere) ran on some supposedly sharp cookies in the highest echelons of Manhattan publishing.
An exercise in moral complexity, 21 is based on Ben Mezrich's book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe) plays brilliant, blue-collar scholar Ben Campbell, whose doubts that he'll win a scholarship to Harvard Medical School compel him to join a secret, M.I.T. gang of math whiz kids. Under the silky but chilling command of a math professor (Kevin Spacey), Jim and the others master card counting, i.e., the statistical analysis of cards dealt in blackjack games.
Helen Mirren reigns supreme in The Queen, a witty and ingenious look at a moment that rocked the house of Windsor: the week that followed the sudden death of Princess Diana in 1997. Diana's death came at just the same time that Prime Minister Tony Blair (played by the bright Michael Sheen) was settling into his new government--and trying to figure out the delicate relationship between 10 Downing Street and Queen Elizabeth II (Mirren).
Danny Boyle (Sunshine) directed this wildly energetic, Dickensian drama about the desultory life and times of an Indian boy whose bleak, formative experiences lead to an appearance on his country's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Jamal (played as a young man by Dev Patel) and his brother are orphaned as children, raising themselves in various slums and crime-ridden neighorhoods and falling in, for a while, with a monstrous gang exploiting children as beggars and prostitutes.
