MOVIE REVIEW
The Lovely Bones (2009)
DreamWorks Studios
Doubt Peter Jackson’s cinematic instincts at your peril. His credentials have been well established throughout a career in which he’s demonstrated mastery of a range of subjects and styles both large (“Lord of the Rings”) and small (micro-budget B pictures such as “Dead Alive”). Yet those instincts fail him in his adaptation of the acclaimed Alice Sebold novel “The Lovely Bones.”
MOVIE REVIEW
The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009)
Screen Media Films
You’re sure to recognize Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn). She’s a pretty, devoted housewife, a regular at the stores near her Connecticut home. Her passivity — her devotion to the blandest of routines — blends her inextricably to her surroundings. They seem to have shaped every contour of her life; whoever she once was and wherever she came from buried beneath a sort of high-class suburban malaise.
MOVIE REVIEW
Mammoth (2009)
Memfis Film/P.A. Jörgensen/IFC Films
“Mammoth," the English-language debut of Lukas Moodyson (“Lilya 4-Ever”) takes itself very, very seriously. Were the ponderous visuals, mannered atmosphere and overwrought soundtrack not enough evidence of that fact, the endless stream of scenes featuring actors dramatically expressing their characters’ inner turmoil confirms it. It’s one of those international compendiums with various storylines centered on the same weighty themes, which mean to say so much about the human condition and modernity that they end up saying perilously little.
MOVIE REVIEW
Red Cliff (2008)
Magnet Releasing
Once among the most prolific directors, John Woo has disappeared in the six years since the release of “Paycheck.” With the domestic opening of this streamlined version of “Red Cliff,” the most expensive Asian-financed film in history and setter of Chinese box-office records, he shows us all where he’s been.
MOVIE REVIEW
Collapse (2009)
Vitagraph Films
In “Collapse,” documentary filmmaker Chris Smith subjects his audience to 82 uninterrupted minutes of the dire end-of-the-world scenario foreseen by former L.A.P.D. officer and freelance journalist Michael Ruppert. The protagonist — in his sure-footed intensity, unwavering commitment to his ideas and knack for what he proclaims to be, “conspiracy fact” — seems at first glance to be one of those nutty prophets of doom one periodically encounters around major American cities and in the murky depths of the Internet. The movie sounds insufferable, but it’s not.
MOVIE REVIEW
Pirate Radio (2009)
Alex Bailey/Focus Features
A box office bomb in Britain, “The Boat That Rocked” has been re-titled, re-edited and handed off to Focus Features for its American release. The move is unlikely to help matters. Now known as “Pirate Radio,” Richard Curtis’s tribute to the illegal radio stations that broadcast rock music to Britain in the 1960s functions as no more than a halfhearted collection of scenarios and characters that’d be more at home in a sitcom.
MOVIE REVIEW
Disney’s A Christmas Carol (2009)
ImageMovers Digital
If there’s one definitive conclusion to be drawn from “Disney’s A Christmas Carol,” it’s this: Motion-capture animation, as practiced by Robert Zemeckis, doesn’t work. This is the third film in the director’s continuing experiment with the technology and — five years after “The Polar Express” — he and his team still haven’t figured out how to preserve the human qualities of the actors beneath the deadened mannequin demeanor forced upon them by the technology.
MOVIE REVIEW
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)
Lena Herzog/66th Venice Film Festival
“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” — which director Werner Herzog only made when screenwriter William Finkelstein gave him “a solemn oath” that it wasn’t a remake of Abel Ferrara’s “Bad Lieutenant” — is as much about a particular idea of post-Katrina New Orleans as it is the bad lieutenant of its title. It’s a depiction of a fevered, lawless world of decay, in which morality and the proper modes of human conduct have fallen by the wayside. The forces of good have left for drier ground, and all that’s left are the looters, exploiters and the drugged.
MOVIE REVIEW
Michael Jackson's This Is It (2009)
Kevin Mazur/AEG/Getty Images
Genuine tribute or cynical money making ploy? That question has surrounded “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” since the project — a compilation of rehearsal footage and behind the scenes interviews accrued during the run-up to Jackson’s planned 50 dates at London’s O2 Arena — was announced shortly after the King of Pop’s death. By keeping the film shrouded in secrecy, first showing it to most critics last night and at a courtesy screening this morning, Sony Pictures and AEG Live did little to stem the tide of suspicion.
MOVIE REVIEW
Amelia (2009)
Ken Woroner/Fox Searchlight Pictures
In the age of convention-defying biopics — films such as “I’m Not There” that reflect the lives of their subjects in content and form — it’s strange to encounter “Amelia.” There could not be a motion picture more diametrically opposed to that aesthetic, more resolutely classical Hollywood in its making. Taking the snapshot approach to a fraction of aviator Amelia Earhart’s (Hilary Swank) life — running through the highlights in rough chronological order — it borrows such old-fashioned conceits as the use of newsreels and headlines to propel things forward and mannered, overly-calculated impressions posing as performances.