Thumbnails Oct 10

by Tony Medley

The Town (9/10): This high-tension caper flick not only has terrific performances by writer-director-star Ben Affleck, Rebecca Hall, and Jeremy Renner, it has some of the best car chases since Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971), along with wonderful location shots of Boston, ending at iconic Fenway Park. Affleck’s bank robbery scenes capture how violently scary they can be.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (9/10): One wouldn’t anticipate an involving tale about how lack of marital commitment can mess up lives to come from writer-director Woody Allen whose own life is hardly the tablet upon which morality can be written, but that’s what we have here with fine performances from the A-list cast that Allen always lures; this time Naomi Watts, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Brolin, and Gemma Jones.

Sequestro (8/10): A stark tale of kidnapping, which is endemic in Brazil, told by a film crew that followed the police for four years with hand held cameras. This frank, tense film that listens in on conversations between kidnappers and the victims’ families, involves the viewer into the terror of a kidnapping while it happens. Among the film’s final words are from a kidnappee talking to his father on the telephone moments after his discovery and release crying into the phone with unabashed joy, “I love you. Dad, they found me!” In Portuguese.

The American (7/10): Marin Ruhe’s cinematography of both the quaint neo-medieval village location and Violante Placido’s voluptuous body makes this worthwhile despite lots and lots of scenes of George Clooney thinking, walking, building a gun, and brooding.

Nowhere Boy (7/10): The unusual relationship between John Lennon and his mother and aunt is examined by this film that is marred by the ill-advised casting of Thomas Sangster as Paul McCartney. Sangster looks like a 12-year-old compared with Aaron Johnson as Lennon, even though in real life they are the same age, but this is a movie and appearance is everything. Even so, it’s a fascinating look at Lennon’s familial problems that shaped his life, and his relationship with McCartney and George Harrison before they became The Beatles and famous. Opens October 8.

Machete (7/10): Despite the fact that Danny Trujo as Machete is wielding knives throughout, director Robert Rodriguez is not of the Quentin Tarantino school that requires that every gross detail of onscreen mayhem be shown. An unlikely comedy that is politically biased and abnormally violent, it’s embellished by numerous scenes of a body double posing as a stark naked Lindsay Lohan.

Heartbreaker (6/10): The tale told in this farce is convoluted enough that the couple who sat next to me confessed that they failed to understand some of the plot points, either, and one of them was French, so could understand the dialogue. As to that, the subtitles were inferior, often blending in with the background, which made understanding even more difficult. A farce depends mightily on the music to frame the action and this score (Klaus Badelt) isn’t up to the task, lessening the impact further. While it’s relatively entertaining, I’ve seen better. In French.

Easy A (3/10): Emma Stone continues her scintillating march toward stardom in this high school farce based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Director Will Gluck, painting with a wide swath, substitutes all Christians for Hawthorne’s Puritans as hypocritical zealots, and takes direct shots at traditional morality, as Stone makes clear in her closing soliloquy. While the format and music are entertaining fun, premise and moral are opaque. There’s a bit of truth in here somewhere, but whatever it is, it is obscured by Gluck’s bias.