Critic's Notebook

Cashing a Payback

MOVIE REVIEW
Edge of Darkness (2010)

By TIM HAYES

Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Pictures

Revenge tragedies should be hot-blooded and cold-hearted, but "Edge of Darkness" is blanded out into something just vaguely mild. It has the curiosity value of a returning Mel Gibson — now a very strange screen presence indeed — as Boston cop Thomas Craven on the trail of his daughter's killer, but that can't hide the fact that it's a weak thriller which forgets to do much thrilling.

Edinburgh '09: Antichrist and Antipasto Giallo at Auld Reekie

By TIM HAYES

Daryl Pittman/S&Z Productions

The Edinburgh International Film Festival 2009 ended with the news that ticket sales were up on the previous year, proving that the move from August to June was helping the festival carve out a new mid-year identity as the organizers intended. The move has also clearly raised the event's appeal to mainstream distributors arranging their summer schedules, with many of the big-ticket items using Edinburgh as a springboard for a wide release shortly after the festival closes. Whether this is putting the squeeze on the number of smaller and quirkier films here will be a point worth watching.

Boogie Nights on Sunset Boulevard

MOVIE REVIEW
Spread (2009)

By TIM HAYES

2009 Sundance Film Festival

A timely satire of Los Angeles's young and shameless could and should have worked, but "Spread" is not that film. This one is a heavy-handed sex comedy that starts off weak and ends up as an outright bad idea. It features a parade of beautiful people being horrible to each other half-dressed and then going to bed to be more horrible to each other in the nude, but despite this it's hard to work up much enthusiasm. The film's real message seems to be that producer and star Ashton Kutcher would like to be Warren Beatty, and if you can handle that concept then kudos to you.

Vanishing Within a Trace

MOVIE REVIEW
The Missing Person (2009)

By TIM HAYES

Strand Releasing

The contradictions in Noah Buschel's modern-dress noir, "The Missing Person," are all honed to a fine edge. Its booze-sodden, hard-boiled private dick can't comprehend the concept of a camera phone but can still discuss the finer points of Stravinsky with the Feds. The grizzled cabbie in the California desert turns out to be a New Yorker and a big admirer of Frank Serpico. And what looks like a general noirish rigmarole of dames, trains and automobiles actually hinges not just on the human catastrophe of New York's blackest day, but on the redemptive power of American art. It's a noir for the ages, and it's a treat.

Taking the Jailbait

MOVIE REVIEW
Fish Tank (2009)

By TIM HAYES

Festival de Cannes

The inconvenient truth about films which prize naturalism above all else is that they can easily meet theatricality coming back the other way. There are elements in Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank" that set it above any previous British kitchen-sink drama, most especially a depiction of young female sexuality handled more deftly than a male director would manage, whatever his documentary credentials. But set against that, the film clanks to a halt at regular intervals to indulge stereotypes so familiar that you wonder what exactly Ms. Arnold was after.

Caught Between Iraq and a Hard Place

MOVIE REVIEW
The Hurt Locker (2008)

By TIM HAYES

Summit Entertainment

"The Hurt Locker" lays its cards on the table with the opening words: "War is a drug." Anyone at odds with that thought will have a tough time at Kathryn Bigelow's film, which gives the notion a good chewing over. Action movies can be a drug too, and luckily for addicts of the hard stuff, Ms. Bigelow finds in the dust of Baghdad a further evolution of her interest in blue-collar obsessives and the macho mindset, and the results are pretty combustible.

Triumph of the Ill Will

MOVIE REVIEW
Inglourious Basterds (2009)

By TIM HAYES

Francois Duhamel/The Weinstein Company

First and foremost, “Inglourious Basterds” is better than “Death Proof” - but then it would be some feat if it had actually been worse. This time, Quentin Tarantino's self-indulgence is relatively corralled, thanks to a bunch of voluntary narrative restraints that pretty much force the director to calm down. In “Death Proof,” Mr. Tarantino was in your ear constantly, fidgeting and giggling and nudging you in the ribs. There are whole stretches of “Basterds” where he shuts up. It must have been an almighty effort.

The problem is that he's achieved this zen condition by being relatively conventional. Or as conventional as a man with his crazy ear for speech patterns and keen eye for the female instep could ever be, when making a WWII epic set in a Nazi-occupied sector of the Twilight Zone.

Drag 'em to Hell

MOVIE REVIEW
Antichrist (2009)

By TIM HAYES

Festival de Cannes

I don't know if it's smart, but I like it. Or more truthfully: I like the fact that Lars von Trier, consumed by whatever black humor and profound doubts fill his days, can create a film so uncompromising, so despairing and so wickedly contrarian that it defies criticism and explanation in equal measure. And I like that he brought it to Cannes and created a storm of outrage, the perfect backdrop for the friendly folk queuing behind me to ask “Wait, this is the guy who made 'Dogma?' ”

Happy as a Pig in Mud on Yasgur's Farm

MOVIE REVIEW
Taking Woodstock (2009)

By TIM HAYES

Ken Regan/Focus Features

All these years admiring Liev Schreiber and it never occurred to me to wonder what he would look like in heels and hose. Wonder no longer. Mr. Schreiber's cross-dressing marine-cum-security guard is the liveliest thing on show in Ang Lee's "Taking Woodstock," an easygoing meander around 1969's legendary three-day music festival that ends up being neither one thing nor another. So Mr. Schreiber fits right in.

Live Ever or Else Swoon to Death

MOVIE REVIEW
Bright Star (2009)

By TIM HAYES

Pathé Films

All the strongest points of Jane Campion's style – the banked-up emotions, circular rhythms and eye for landscapes – are on full display in “Bright Star.” Marking a return to the Cannes red carpet 16 years after she won the Palme d'or here for “The Piano.” Ms. Campion's new film follows an equally conflicted love story, and along the way confirms all over again that she is one of the finest directors of actors around.