The Ghost Writer

No director does paranoia like Roman Polanski, and his latest film, The Ghost Writer, is a model of crackling suspense and suspicion. Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Kim Catttrall, Olivia Williams and Tom Wilkinson swoop and swerve around one another effortlessly, guided assuredly by Polanski's masterful direction and a script that is a dream of literate intrigue and snipe. It's been ages since I've been in a film with a story so fresh, lean and tightly crafted that my attention NEVER wavered. Wonderfully entertaining.

Green Zone

Green Zone is more than a Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon vanity project but less than the latest Bourne installment. It has the kinetic madness of both Supremacy and Ultimatum and a bit of the political craziness of a Syriana but it lacks heft and intrigue mainly because we know the story -- there weren't no WMD. Greengrass's signature hand-held camera work left me especially dyspeptic this go round. Damon, long one of my favorites, delivers.

Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is a visual feast but it is not the cinematic wonder that Avatar is and it often feels junky and cluttered, qualities that are worsened by the 3D effects. I don't think I could have tolerated more length but the film feels disjointed and underdeveloped. Mia Wasikowska (stellar in HBO'sIn Treatment in 2008) is suitably spunky as Alice but the film overall is anemic and uninvolving. Pity.

Edge of Darkness

Edge of Darkness is like a conventional detective flick except for the body count and the bloodletting. Mel Gibson's performance as a Boston detective whose whistleblower daughter is shot down on his doorstep is surefooted, his Boston accent not too distracting and he is fairly generous when playing against the others in the cast. In fact, a fairly long scene between him and a mysterious British fixer played by Ray Winstone is a highpoint of the film. The lowest point is the last scene, which reunites Gibson's Tommy Craven and his murdered daughter, Emma, for a last goodbye. It's unbearably treacly.

Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island feels more like a tribute to Hitchcock, Welles and Polanski and less of Scorsese's own unique vision. That's not to say it's a bad movie. I don't think Scorsese is capable of making a bad film. It's to say that the story (suitably convoluted and deceptive) is secondary to the staging wh...ich are infused touches of the "old" masters. Yes, it's beautiful but it's not really bold.

A Single Man

While Colin Firth and Julianne Moore undoubtedbly offer the best performances in A Single Man, it's Firth's searing scenes with the young actor Nicholas Hoult that give this marvelous film it's complexity and, ultimately, it's romantic ambivalence. Adapted by director Tom Ford from the novel by Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man is startlingly beautiful and achingly human. I loved it.

The Book of Eli

The Book of Eli is not devoid of ideas, the action sequences are tight, the twist is a bit surprising, and the parade of British character actors is delightful but the movie feels more like an exercise than a complete work. Denzel does Denzel without much exertion. The morality, which is to say the message of the movie, is unclear. Still, the showdown set piece featuring Denzel, co-star Mila Kunis, Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour is masterfully choreographed.

Daybreakers

The vampire science is ridiculous and the guts and gore are pornographic but I love ghoulish feeding frenzies that end with decapitations? Yum.

It's Complicated

It's Complicated is not complicated at all. It's a pristinely crafted storythat's set in some of the most impeccably appointed interiors this side of House Beautiful. (www.housebeautiful.com) Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin are an inspired pairing as two exes who haven't completely embraced their ex-ness.

Invictus

Clint Eastwood's Invictus is from start to finish a paean to human decency. The film exploits (in the positive sense of that term) every visual and musical cue to rouse the audience as it tells its tale of a heretofore pitiful South African rugby team's battle for world domination, and respectability, in 1995. The team's struggle was emblematic of the nation's own quest under the leadership of Nelson Mandela.

Brothers

Brothers is a perfectly decent movie with credible, spot on performances from beginning to end. Everyone hits the marks, each scene is crafted for optimal believability and the ending is satisfying. It is a good but unremarkable film. The child actress Bailee Madison holds her own when on the screen with Gyllenhaal, Portman and Maguire.

The Road

Yes, The Road is as bleak, maybe bleaker, than you had pictured it in your head while reading the book. But, as McCarthy had intended, those redeeming moments of transcendent humanity are to be found in the boy, played by the young Aussie actor Kodi Smith-McPhee. What a face.

A Serious Man

The Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man" left me sad and blue as I thought about the Jobian troubles that had befallen the mild-mannered physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Were he not so blasted mild-mannered half of the crap that he had to deal with wouldn't have happened. Therein lies the beauty of this "morality" tale.

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes really packs a wallop, and that's a good thing. The Holmes / Watson interplay put me in mind of a more amped-up House / Wilson pairing from the TV series House, all bromance and codependency.

Colors

Jay Smooth and the Yankee Victory

Jay Smooth through the uprights

Jay Smooth's Polanski Commentary

Pandorum

This poster for Pandorum is so off-the-mark it's easy to imagine the designer had not seen the film or read the script. Or maybe the film was once a very different movie. Many reviews have commented on the dozen or so previous sci-fi movies being referenced here ~ Alien, The Matrix, THX 1138 ~ but it reminded me most of the Wizard of Oz set on a enormous colonizing vehicle somewhere in space in the 22nd century. Ben Foster is hunky Dorothy and Dennis Quaid the wizard. The acting is "incredible" and the edits are synaptic but it's a tantric experience. No release.

Gamer

Gamer tapped the same nerve as Inglourious Basterds but with less subtlety. I was actually surprised by quality of actors -- Gerard Butler, Michael C. Hall (Dexter), Krya Sedgwick -- in this film about a future world where cyberga...mers pay big buck...s to "puppetmaster" death row inmates through blood sports and sexcapades. The story is nonsense, blood flows freely but the cinematography is exceptional.

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds is a masterpiece of cathartic brutality and exquisite, old Hollywood tension and menace. It's riveting and exhausting and Tarantino. Wonderful. Christoph Waltz is the star of the film, not Brad Pitt. As SS Col. Hans Landa, Waltz is chillingly unforgettable. It is his face, not Hitler's or Goebbels', that is seared in mind as the face of Nazism, albeit an opportunistic kind of Nazism. The set piece that opens the film could serve as a master class in studied control. His performance throughout the film is outstanding.

Taking Woodstock

Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock is strangely inert and uninvolving, mainly because the film's lead, Demitri Martin, is so wooden. The wonderful British character actor Imelda Staunton is the lone standout in this movie, as Martin's disappro...ving and controlling Jewish mother. It's beautifully filmed but it's not art. The psychedelic LSD trip is fun.

District 9

District 9 is a wildly ambitious sci-fi movie with a virtuoso performance by Sharlto Copley as an inept South African bureaucrat who is given the task of relocating about 2 million alien (as in space) refugees from a squalid containment camp to another.... After being exposed to some alien DNA, Copley becomes a whole other character and heads roll (literally). It's fierce and bloody and fun.

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" takes the unique "battlefield" horrors of the war in Iraq and their effect on service men and turns the resulting madness both inward and outward with an intensity I've not felt in a film for quite a while. The film follows a trio of short-timers in a bomb squad as they move from one impossibly tense encounter with IEDs or suicide bombers to the next.

Orphan

The Orphan was disappointing, not just because the waif-from-hell storyline features the dumbest family in the history of demon children movies but also because a boom mike can be spotted in every other interior scene. How did this shite get released? Good lord! The kid, Isabelle Fuhrman, who's like 12 years old and a native of my hometown, is pretty creepy though. Her Russian accent is a little spotty. Don't ask.