The Kingdom

*** Stars

The Kingdom, which was slated to open back in April of this year, manages to rise above that scheduling conflict and turn in a gritty, fast-paced thriller. Unfortunately, that's all it turns in.

Jamie Foxx is up to his usual tricks (like his other roles in Jarhead and Miami Vice) as a bad-ass in training and turns in an affective performance as Ronald Fleury, an FBI Special Agent who assembles an elite team to find a killer responsible for a terrorist attack (where Americans are killed) inside a Western housing compound in Saudi Arabia. His team is an A-list class with Chris Cooper, Jennifer Gardner, and a surprise dramatic turn from Arrested Development's Jason Bateman. When the team lands into the desert, they are unwelcome by the Saudi's. Through determination and passion, the team must find a way to come to an agreement with the them and find who is responsible before another tragic event occurs.

The movie is extremely face-paced. Peter Berg's (directed the wonderful Friday Night Lights) sharp direction really lets you forget that the film's characters are underwritten and puppets in a typical action thriller. Still, after the action is over, the movie ends on a note that brings the conclusion to a satisfying close.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

***1/2 Stars

Hollywood veteran Sidney Lumet is in his eighties and is directing material that is a shadow of Quentin Tarantino. At first, I was having trouble with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead because it reminded me too much of a Tarantino film with its dialogue driven characters and playing with the order of time. So I had to stop for a moment and get that out of mind before it took away from the film. After seeing it for it was, this is a film powered by an electric performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman. Ethan Hawke tries to match his caliber and comes up short, but in a way it works here because Hawke is the weaker brother when it comes to the situations they get themselves in. The situations are two people who can be good people, but choose to do very bad things. And this is clear when the tag-line of the film is "No one was suppose to get hurt."

What makes Lumet such a great director is his patience towards camera movements. He lets things fold naturally, as if you are actually in the same room with all of his characters. The very first shot of the film feels like a sister to the sex-scene in Marc Fosters's Monsters Ball with Andrew Hanson (Hoffman) and his wife Gina (the gorgeous Marisa Tomei) on vacation having some nice animal sex. Its shocking at first, but after they finish they discuss things any normal couple talks about: happiness, fears, doubts, their future, and the fear of becoming distant. What Andy doesn't know is that Gina is also having an affair, with his brother Henry (Hawke).

Henry is a divorced man unable to pay his child support bills. So when his brother Andy proposes a jewelry store heist, it takes a small amount of convincing for him to go along with it, until he tells them that it will be their parents store they are robbing. Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris play their parents Charles and Nanette, who are just living out their final years together. They own the jewelry store with steady business and without any serious problems, until Nanette is killed in the failed heist by his brothers. Nothing was supposed to happen. No mess, no deaths, no problems. Right?

Wrong.

The two are now forced to cover their own skins, while also grieving for the death of their mother and now the emptiness of their father. Their downfall is filled with regret, mischief, betrayal, and utter tragedy. These two failed to think of the worst case scenario because they assumed that it was the perfect heist. Well in a way it was, on paper. The store would be robbed with Andy and Henry collecting the profit and the insurance covering their parents. Throughout this entire film I just thought about a quote my mother has been saying to me for literally my entire life: "Think Before You Act." That also could have been the film's tagline.

Eastern Promises

***1/2 Stars

David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises marks the first time the director left his home country of Canada to make a film. Shot in London, this unique crime thriller is an interesting study of characters, caught in lives of hidden sadness and unfulfilling sacrifices.

Viggo Mortensen is in top form as Nikolai Luzhin, a Russian-born driver for the Vory V Zakone (the Russian Mafia, literally meaning "Thieves in Law"). To prepare for his role, Mortensen traveled alone to Moscow to study the language and lives of the Vory V Zakone. This group tells their story through tattoos (which turns out to very important in the story) and each one signifies a stepping stone of their life in the mob. You will see Mortensen covered in these, while also perfecting Nikolai's Siberian accent.

Nikolai, like George Clooney's Michael Clayton, is a janitor. He cleans up messes when things get dirty. However, Eastern Promises has a much darker setting. While Clayton took care of lobbying and hit-and-runs, Nikolai is cutting up bodies and discarding them properly. Through his ordeals, Nikolai comes across an innocent midwife named Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts) who slips into the lives of people she shouldn't be involved with. When a fourteen year old mother dies while giving birth on Anna's shift, she is forced to find a home for the child. She comes across the girl's diary. Written in Russian, Anna is forced to find someone to translate it. She finds a card in the diary for the Trans-Saberian restaurant owned by Seymon, the boss of the family Nikolai works for. She wonders over to find some clues and he immediately agrees to help her translate the diary. Why is he so willing to help her? Who is this man? The past of all of these characters are intertwined in a story of interpersonal connections inside dialogue of social utterances.

Eastern Promises is more mainstream and has a similar style to Cronenberg's last directorial effort A History of Violence. Both tell a small segment of a bigger story, like a middle chapter of something we have already seen. It digs deep into scenarios that would be deleted from an ordinary crime thriller. For example, we see the film shot in Nikolai's and Anna's perspective, witnessing the lives of a Mafia family losing grips with reality and tangling itself into inner hysteria. Both lead characters are world's apart but both understand what they have to do. Anna is not just an ordinary woman caught in a web of bad people. She is trying to right a wrong similar to regrets of her past. She in fact suffered a stillborn birth years prior, giving her the thrust to find this baby a rightful owner.

Viggo Mortensen brings his character alive with the intent of showing a human, not a figure. Although Nikolai is externally fearless, he is having doubts because of his past and what made him get to where he is. Will he run away or finish what he started? The ending's setup begins to turn melodramatic, but a last minute fix steers it to a place you won't see coming. A twist of fate brings everything to a rightfully fitting finale.

The Brave One

*** Stars

The Brave one is an excruciatingly difficult film to watch. I saw this on a Sunday afternoon and lets say I ended the weekend on a rather strange note. However, Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard are two great actors at the top of their game in this brutal drama about one woman who loses herself throughout the entire film.

Erica Bain (Foster) is getting married. She is madly in love with him. Now of course in a drama like this, even if you haven't seen the trailer, you know that things can't end happy. So what happens next? Her and her loving fiance are brutally attacked, leaving Erica badly wounded and her fiancé dead.

When she recovers, she doesn't leave her apartment because she is afraid of the outside world. After a long time in solitude, she hits the streets again, but buys a gun in the process. She begins to prowl the streets at night, putting justice to those who are responsible for her beating. This puts her on a violent killing spree, one she may never get out of. She befriends a NYPD detective (Terrence Howard) who is on her case. He is unaware that Erica is actually the one committing these acts.

Director Neil Gordan (Breakfast on Pluto) executes stunning camera work here, giving us a haunted tale of brutality and a vast emptiness. The movie is fast paced and extremely interesting to watch. The plot however, goes from confusing, to convoluted, to insane. Still, this is such an interesting character study with such great performances from the two leads, that they dig a hole you won't be able to crawl out from.

3:10 to Yuma

**** Stars

Another four star review, and I'm loving every minute of it.

Russell Crowe and Christian Bale are two of the finest actors on the planet, both giving Oscar caliber performances in one of the best westerns I have seen in recent memory.

The story is beautiful, poetic, and staggeringly exciting. James Mangold (director of the great Walk the Line) brings back the western genre with such urgency and respect that it deserves to be a bonafide box office crowd pleaser.

Dan Evans (Bale), a civil war survivor turned rancher struggles to support family during a long drought, which extremely hurts his ranch. He takes a job to transport the evil outlaw Benjamin Wade (Crowe), the most notorious gangster of them all. Once the two meet, the criminal tries to tempt him into giving him more money then the job intends to give him. Obviously Evans is tempted, but he is determined to send this ruthless man to the Yuma prison.

The movie works dramatically in addition to being a flawless entertainment. I have never seen the original Yuma (which I will watch very soon) but to me this a original piece of cinema that brings us closer to balance with this years trilogy curse (Spidey 3, Shrek 3, Rush Hour 3 etc...) and hopefully this is not the last time Crowe and Bale unite. This is the duo of the year.

In The Valley of Elah

***1/2 Stars

What baffles me about our country's choice in movies is the evidence pertaining to films that either strike gold at the box-office or plummet into oblivion. For example, we had Meet the Spartans (a film only eight year olds seeing their first PG-13 movie ever would enjoy) open strongly at $18.5 million. This is a film that ads further proof to our obsession with celebrity gossip and pointless gags, where In the Valley of Elah is a hard-hitting-slam-dunk of timely importance. What's its total domestic gross? $6 million.

I wonder how the cast & crew felt about their film's result. Director Paul Haggis has already been getting negative backlash for his Best Picture win with Crash. For those mad that Brokeback didn't win, I understand your loss, but Haggis is not responsible for the Academy's choice (even though I believe it was the right one). ITVOE's $6 million opening probably comes from the speculation before its opening. The buzz was not good. People did not want to see Haggis succeed again, even though out of all the post 9/11 films, this one was the critical favorite. Tommy Lee Jones played a big part in its artistic success.

Jones is perfectly cast as Hank Deerfield, an army veteran whose son is stationed over in Iraq. What makes this performance so strong is Jones commitment to authenticity and simplicity. The film begins with Hank living his everyday life. He wakes up, eats breakfast, puts up the American Flag, fixes his truck, does errands, and spends time with his wife (played by the emotional Susan Sarandon). This is an American, one who understands reality but also expects something in return. When his son disappears after returning home from the Iraq War, Hank soon discovers that serving your country is not what it used to be. His son was murdered, in a way no parent should witness. With the help of local Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), Hank journey's back to try and discover the hidden truth behind his son's heartbreaking death.

The relationship between Jones and Theron's characters is more complex than we would expect. Theron is not just a detective trying to get ahead. Her life is explored through the case of Hank's son. The case not only affects her work, but also her role as a mother. There is a touching scene where Hank tells a story to her son about where David battled Goliath, right in the valley of Elah.

Out of all the Iraq War films, I would say this one is the most sincere. Not for one second does this film promote anti-American propaganda. Haggis and company show their love for what our country stands for. However, they, along with myself, just want those running it to give us a sign that we truly are a land of the free and home of the brave. There's a scene where Hank is driving past a school and notices that the American flag is upside down. He tells the janitor who put the flag up (he is of Spanish decent) that it’s a distress code, signifying that our nation is under duress. Should Hank leave it the way it is?