Firewall (2006) [Widescreen Edition] – DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Harrison Ford, Paul Bettany, Virginia Madsen, Mary Lynn Rajskub
screenplay by Joe Forte
directed by Richard Loncraine

Firewallcapby Walter Chaw Because 63-year-old Harrison Ford is pushing mandatory retirement age in most industries, his new movie Firewall is aimed squarely at an older, more affluent, less savvy demographic. Casting the aging demigod as a greying bank executive extorted by the usual band of eurotrash techno-terrorists holding his perfect family hostage, it's a fable of paranoia that finds evil in not only the modern cell phone bogey, but other mysterious beasts like iPods, phone cameras, GPS devices, fax machines, and online banking, too. Its never-explained title, in fact, refers to a technology that protects against malignant computer codes floating around the World Wide Web–but rather than try to define this for an audience that's ideally long-resistant to such cogent explanations, it makes the "firewall" a literal thing by devolving into another homeland security allegory, with the craggy paterfamilias meting out sweet vengeance against a gaggle of interlopers. Better to have called it "Antivirus"–but Michael Bay's probably reserved that title for his kick-ass foreign terrorist/avian flu metaphor.

The Break-Up (2006)

**/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Jennifer Aniston, Joey Lauren Adams, Ann-Margret
screenplay by Jeremy Garelick & Jay Lavender
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw Vince Vaughn can never seem sincere, only dazed and slack, making his proto-slob Gary in Peyton Reed’s infernal The Break-Up an odd object of desire for art gallery receptionist Brooke–or he would be if Brooke weren’t played by vanilla pudding Jennifer Aniston. The problem with the picture is that it’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (or the more-often-invoked Scenes from a Marriage)–with healthy doses of Swingers and The 40 Year Old Virgin to confuse the rancour–played by one-note actors who demonstrate not a soupçon of chemistry, thereby engendering zero rooting interest in their counterparts’ reunion. (The fact that the two stars appear to have found love off camera regardless suggests the Proof of Life Effect for the anti-romcom set.) You have to respect a picture that sports at least three or four scenes straight out of Hell and has the good sense at one point to mention it in so many words, like when Brooke comes home to find Gary engaged in some weird bacchanal, the two exchanging a long wordless look across the wasteland as the world comes to an end. But there’s so little presence demonstrated by either of the principals that the movie finally feels disconnected and inconsequential.

London (2006) – DVD

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras C
starring Chris Evans, Jason Statham, Jessica Biel, Joy Bryant
written and directed by Hunter Richards

Londoncapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. I'll say this for Hunter Richards's London: it's compelling enough that you want its "hero" to get his. Whatever the (obnoxious, belligerent, self-absorbed) nature of main character Syd (Chris Evans), he's a well-drawn example of a common macho type, meaning the more stupid things he does the more you crave to see his comeuppance. But "payback" in this case would mean rejection by his ex-girlfriend London (Jessica Biel), whose going-away party he's just crashed–and no matter how many flashbacks we get to him behaving like a jerk in her presence, the film's total commitment to his point-of-view gives us the sinking feeling that he's not going to receive the brush-off he deserves. And sure enough.

Darwin’s Nightmare (2005) – DVD

***/**** Image C+ Sound C+
directed by Hubert Sauper

by Walter Chaw Told almost completely in extended wordless sequences, Darwin's Nightmare covers how the introduction of feral perch to Tanzania's Lake Victoria to sate a ravenous European market has spelled doom for locals enlisted ("enslaved," director Hubert Sauper would insist) to harvest it at subsistence levels, forcing them to scavenge among the discards for sustenance. Even worse, Sauper suggests that arms traffickers use the incoming cargo planes–the very ones entrusted with the export of the perch–to smuggle their own illicit wares and thus further exploit stricken Africa. We learn that the perch were introduced into the lake as a means of supplementing an over-fished native supply to ironically-fantastic results–a perch boom that on-message factory owners and government officials proclaim as an economic miracle.

Tennessee Williams Film Collection – DVD

MustownA STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE (1951)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter, Karl Malden
screenplay by Tennessee Williams, based on his play
directed by Elia Kazan

BABY DOLL (1956)
****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B+
starring Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock
screenplay by Tennessee Williams
directed by Elia Kazan

MustownCAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF (1958)
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Burl Ives, Jack Carson
screenplay by Richard Brooks and James Poe, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by Richard Brooks

THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (1961)
*/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Vivien Leigh, Warren Beatty, Lotte Lenya, Jill St. John
screenplay by Gavin Lambert, based on the novel by Tennessee Williams
directed by José Quintero

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)
***/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras A
starring Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Shirley Knight, Ed Begley
screenplay by Richard Brooks, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by Richard Brooks

THE NIGHT OF THE IGUANA (1964)
****/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras A
starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, Sue Lyon
screenplay by Anthony Veiller and John Huston, based on the play by Tennessee Williams
directed by John Huston

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS’ SOUTH (1973)
**½*/**** Image C Sound D
directed by Harry Rasky

Tennesseestreetcarcapby Walter Chaw Marlon Brando is liquid sex in A Streetcar Named Desire, molten and mercurial. He’s said that he modeled his Stanley Kowalski after a gorilla, and the manner in which Stanley eats, wrist bent at an almost fey angle, picking at fruit and leftovers in the sweltering heat of Elia Kazan’s flophouse New Orleans, you can really see the primate in him. (Imagine a gorilla smelling a flower.) Brando’s Stanley is cunning, too: he sees through the careful artifice of his sister-in-law Blanche (Vivien Leigh, Old Hollywood), and every second he’s on screen, everything else wilts in the face of him. It’s said that Tennessee Williams used to buy front-row seats to his plays and then laugh like a loon at his rural atrocities; he’s something like the Shakespeare of sexual politics, the poet laureate of repression, and in his eyes, he’s only ever written comedies. In Kazan’s and Brando’s too, I’d hazard, as A Streetcar Named Desire elicits volumes of delighted laughter. The way that Stanley’s “acquaintances” are lined up in his mind to appraise the contents of Blanche’s suitcase. The way he invokes “Napoleonic Law” with beady-eyed fervour. And the way, finally, that he’s right about Blanche and all her hysterical machinations. The moment Stanley introduces himself to Blanche is of the shivers-causing variety (like the moment John Ford zooms up to John Wayne in Stagecoach), but my favourite parts of the film–aside from his torn-shirt “STELLA!”–are when Stanley screeches like a cat, and when he threatens violence on the jabbering Blanche by screaming, “Hey, why don’t you cut the re-bop!”

Mommie Dearest (1981) [Hollywood Royalty Edition] – DVD

**/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Faye Dunaway, Steve Forrest, Diana Scarwid, Mara Hobel
screenplay by Frank Yablans & Frank Perry and Tracy Hotchner and Robert Getchell, based on the book by Christina Crawford
directed by Frank Perry

Mommiedearestcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover How sad to think the only popular remnant of Christina Crawford's debunking of her abusive mother is a bad movie famous for its overacting. Many have thrilled to the awesome camp spectacle of Faye Dunaway chewing scenery as Joan Crawford in all her alcoholic clean-freak glory, yet I somehow can't join the party: as ridiculous as the "Biggest Mother of Them All" may be, there was a victim of her unknowing self-parody–and seeing that sufferer get a thorough shellacking is just a little hard to take. It's like watching some halfwit drunk try to pick up an unwilling woman at a bar: his feeble come-ons might amuse if only they didn't result in the horrible discomfort of the second party. In any other context, Dunaway's fare-thee-well performance would guarantee instant hilarity, but the horrible things the titular Mommie Dearest does to her helpless prey kind of squelch the drag-queen pleasures to be had.

The Producers (2005) [Widescreen] – DVD

ZERO STARS/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell
screenplay by Mel Brooks & Thomas Meehan
directed by Susan Stroman

Producers2005capby Walter Chaw Max Bialystock (Nathan Lane) is responsible for exactly the kind of garbage that runs for years on the Great White Way, except that for the purposes of The Producers, his plays close in a couple of days, leaving Bialystock constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and at the mercy of a long, horny line of elderly widows and rich spinsters. I don't think old women in pillbox hats renting Nathan Lane by the hour for a few dry humps is particularly funny (or realistic)–but some people, especially those reared on vaudeville, think it's hysterical. When auditor Leo Bloom (Matthew Broderick) casually mentions that it might actually be more profitable to stage a very expensive flop, Max hatches a plan in which the two will mount the worst stage production in history, thus bilking their investors out of a coupla million. After finding the worst playwright (Will Ferrell), the worst director (Gary Beach), and the worst actress (Ulla (Uma Thurman)), they proceed to stage a musical that celebrates the Third Reich called "Springtime for Hitler". Lo and behold, it's taken as tongue-in-cheek and becomes the talk of the town. You'd call it "irony" except that this eventuality is not at all unexpected–and wasn't even when it happened the first time, in 1968.

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) [Rock On Edition] – DVD

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring P.J. Soles, Vincent Van Patten, Clint Howard, Dey Young
screenplay by Richard Whitley & Russ Dvonich and Joseph McBride
directed by Allan Arkush

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I could be fastidious and tell you of Rock 'N' Roll High School's faults–that it's cheesy, for instance, with cheap jokes and a relentlessly peppy mindset that somehow contradicts the presence of punk pioneers The Ramones. Yet the film's various demerits add up to a plus, as the exuberance of the whole thing renders it absurdly enjoyable. Much like punk itself (though not like punk at all), the inappropriateness of juxtaposed elements creates sparks that make you wanna dance. This is the big latter-day musical John Landis was gunning for with The Blues Brothers but had too much money and too little sense to achieve: a film that resurrects the innocent, let's-put-on-a-show mentality of old musicals and mates it to the burning-schoolhouse mentality of rock-and-roll. Most people can see that The Ramones have no place in a bouncy teen comedy, but that's almost the best joke in the movie's arsenal.

The Ringer (2005) – DVD

*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Johnny Knoxville, Brian Cox, Katherine Heigl, Jed Rees
screenplay by Ricky Blitt
directed by Barry W. Blaustein

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of fascinating things embedded in the premise and execution of Barry W. Blaustein’s Farrelly Brothers-produced The Ringer, the story of Steve Barker, a broke cubicle monkey who tries to do the right thing and ends up trying to rig the Special Olympics by impersonating a mentally-challenged athlete. One is the notion that it’s easier to feign retardation to the non-challenged than it is to the challenged; and the other is that, in taking Barker’s “Jeffy” at face value, there’s actually less offense in this broad play for sentimental, slapstick chuckles than in the Oscar-winning/aspiring pieces (Forrest Gump, I Am Sam, Rain Man) Steve uses as research. “There’s the secret,” a habit-clad Kate Winslet confides to Ricky Gervais in the brilliant debut of his new show, “Extras”. “If you want an Oscar you have to play a mental.”

American Dad – Volume One (2005) – DVD

Image A Sound A Extras C
"American Dad (Pilot)," "Threat Levels," "Stan Knows Best," "Francine's Flashback," "Roger Codger," "Homeland Insecurity," "Deacon Stan, Jesus Man," "Bullocks to Stan," "A Smith in the Hand," "All About Steve," "Con Heir," "Stan of Arabia (Part One)," "Stan of Arabia (Part Two)"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "American Dad" is not without merit: though nowhere near as funny as Seth MacFarlane's flagship series "Family Guy" (or as pithy as that show's model, "The Simpsons"), it's surprisingly watchable once you get into the groove of its initial 13-episode run. Still, its send-up of American chauvinism flips over rather easily into a celebration of same whenever it verges on damaging critique. "American Dad" is like that college radical who turns conservative upon realizing he has to bring home the bacon–in fact, it shores up the double-edged sword of all Dumb Father comedies like "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons", which walk the knife-edge between mockery and glorification of the male imperative to be a thoughtless, self-indulgent jerk.

The Da Vinci Code (2006)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno
screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, based on the novel by Dan Brown
directed by Ron Howard

Davincicodeby Walter Chaw The greatest threat that Dan Brown's novel, and now Ron Howard's film of the same, poses to spirituality is the same threat that any bad art presents the human soul. The Da Vinci Code is a retarded attempt to summarize painstaking scholarship and liturgy into broadly digestible gruel. In the eyes of many, it's what the Christian Bible is to centuries of pagan mythology and millennia of cultural anthropology: the greatest stories ever told, retold in a form that illiterates and the gullible can appreciate. It's nothing more and nothing less than The Celestine Prophecy (itself adapted for the silver screen this annus mirabilus) for fallen Catholics and armchair intellectuals: books so poorly-written, so bereft of poetry and grace, that they cannot offend (or repel) the unschooled and the indiscriminate with their oblique-ness, each about poetry and grace so brusquely raped and "decoded" that the "conspiracy"–the great mystery of great art–is laid bare as bad thriller material. It's skipping forward to read the last page of the book–and the wrong book at that. Is it really ironic that Ron Howard, who has never directed a graceful scene, has never had a film with a hint of a whiff or subtext (his version of "genius at work" is a holodeck (see: A Beautiful Mind and now The Da Vinci Code)) is the chosen one for the adaptation (along with partner in extreme, middlebrow-pleasing mendacity Akiva Goldsman) of an obscenely popular book (60-million copies sold and counting) that makes anyone with a half a brain crazy with grief for the plight of the sublime in our culture?

Laura (1944) [Fox Film Noir] + Pinky (1949) [Cinema Classics Collection] – DVDs

LAURA
***/**** Image B Sound B- Extras B
starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson
screenplay by Jay Dratler and Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt, based on the novel by Vera Caspary
directed by Otto Preminger

PINKY
*/**** Image C Sound B- Extras A+
starring Jeanne Crain, Ethel Barrymore, Ethel Waters, William Lundigan
screenplay by Philip Dunne and Dudley Nichols, from a novel by Cid Ricketts Sumner
directed by Elia Kazan

by Walter Chaw A camp classic of a very particular variety, Otto Preminger’s stylish, pedigreed Laura might best be read as a satire of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, reuniting that film’s Judith Anderson with another late, lamented mistress and acres more scenery to chew. It replaces George Sanders with Vincent Price, Laurence Olivier with stiff-as-a-board Boy Scout Dana Andrews, and a never-present heroine with Gene Tierney, she of the unspeakably gorgeous cheekbones. Laura easily laps most films for narrative complexity, the sheer number of audacious hairpins it negotiates on the road of logic dizzying for their arbitrary contortions. The character of a fey, fifty-ish critic, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), who introduces himself to a detective investigating the murder of the titular Laura (Tierney) by stepping out of a bath like some hybrid of Smithers and Mr. Burns, acts as the piece’s unreliable narrator, stalking through his scenes like a dandy in honorary high collar and spats while providing the strangest contention in a strange film: that this aging, fey, homosexual lothario was passionately in love with his ward, Laura. The picture might be the most overt iteration of film noir as a genre about emasculation ever put to celluloid, and trying to puzzle out whether Waldo’s for real and chief gumshoe McPherson (Andrews) buys any of his honeyed hooey constitutes a good portion of what’s fun and maddening in equal measure about it. That tension between what’s ridiculous and what the characters take seriously makes Laura a mystery, for sure, but not for the obvious reasons.

Second Best (2005) – DVD

*/**** Image B Sound C+ Commentary A-
starring Joe Pantoliano, Jennifer Tilly, Boyd Gaines, Bronson Pinchot
written and directed by Eric Weber

by Alex Jackson Eric Weber's Second Best is not only a bad movie, it's an arrogantly bad movie. It thinks it has a God-given right to be poorly- acted, written, and directed. Though I'm loath to endorse the source, to paraphrase "South Park" creator Trey Parker, I hate bad Hollywood films but I REALLY fucking hate bad independent films. You would have to be far out of the studio system and truly have the courage of your convictions to make a movie as utterly self-absorbed as Second Best. This transparently autobiographical film exposes its author as whiny, slimy, and smug. I have never been so repulsed by the characters in a movie or the people behind it. It must take Weber's psychiatrist every ounce of strength to not drug his client and talk him into feeding pieces of his face to a dog.

Late Spring (1949) [The Criterion Collection] – DVD

Banshun
晩春

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-

starring Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, Yumeji Tsukioka, Haruko Sugimura
screenplay by Kôgo Noda & Yasujiro Ozu
directed by Yasujiro Ozu

Latespringcapby Travis Mackenzie Hoover Like Robert Bresson or Andrei Tarkovsky, Yasujiro Ozu is one of those great directors with bullyboy supporters for whom the title "great" doesn't begin to scratch the surface. It's not enough for their man to be a pillar of the cinema: he has to be a moral axiom, if not part of the space-time fabric itself, and God help you if you merely like one of his crystalline masterpieces. (We've reached the point where even academics will intimidate you if you take a mildly contradictory position.) But we at FFC are a defiant bunch, so with trepidation I must announce that while Late Spring is a good movie, a solid flick–let's not get carried away. To be sure, there are plenty of thematic strands to suss out of its narrative, making it a film that rewards repeat viewings. Nevertheless, I can't say that it's a destroyer like Tokyo Story or any of the other legitimately great works in Ozu's canon. Don't hit me, I bruise easily.

Drawing Restraint 9 (2006)

**½/****
starring Matthew Barney, Björk, Shigeru Akahori, Koji Maki
written and directed by Matthew Barney

by Walter Chaw Where Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 falls short of his brilliant, seminal Cremaster series is in its decision to focus on the exploitation of natural resources from whaling through to oil–as filtered through the prism of Japanese industry (using Shinto as the primary test)–rather than on, as in Cremaster, the process and scope of myth-making from the Celts to the Masons to Gary Gilmore. The focus is too discrete for the far-reaching archetypes Barney's disquieting, biomechanical surrealism suggests (he's somewhere at the fulcrum between Salvador Dali and David Cronenberg)–the attempt to articulate the perversity of man's exploitation of their natural resources seems a little like what it is: an artist too good and too provocative to waste his time on something that sells so trite.

Poseidon (2006)

ZERO STARS/****
starring Kurt Russell, Josh Lucas, Jacinda Barrett, Richard Dreyfuss
screenplay by Mark Protosevich, based on the novel The Poseidon Adventure by Paul Gallico
directed by Wolfgang Petersen

Poseidonby Walter Chaw Sort of like Ghost Ship without the gore (and it promptly loses the points it earns for being sans Julianna Marguiles by featuring Kevin Dillon), Wolfgang Petersen's soggy underwater soaper Poseidon starts with a theoretically exciting (but just unintentionally hilarious) set-piece and limps the rest of the way on the standard old slogging-through-wet-hallways bullroar that may be the very definition of "un-exciting." Kurt Russell is Robert, an ex-fireman/ex-New York mayor who appears to have a gambling problem and a contentious relationship with his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum), which will of course be resolved, Mark Twain-style, by a late-in-the-show heroic action. Josh Lucas is Dylan, the rogue ex-Navy man with a plan; Jimmy Bennett is the buck-toothed little idiot who wanders off a lot (and Jacinda Barrett is his long-suffering mom, Maggie); Richard Dreyfuss plays Richard, a suicidal queen planning on leaving his pals with a hefty bill by leaping from the mighty Poseidon luxury liner's galleria after dinner; and all people of colour are meatbags to be fed to the mill whenever someone needs an example of what could happen to the rich whiteys not unfortunate enough to be in steerage.

The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion (1970) – DVD

Le foto proibite di una signora per bene
**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
starring Dagmar Lassander, Pier Paolo Capponi, Simon Andreu, Susan Scott
screenplay by Ernesto Gastaldi
directed by Luciano Ercoli

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Minou (Dagmar Lassander) is speaking of her beloved spouse Peter (Pier Paolo Capponi): "He's been everything to me," she says, "husband, father…" Yes, it's 1970, and women were still expected in some quarters to be adoring children gazing upward at their supermen companions. To be sure, The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion tries to disabuse its luscious red-haired protag of her habit, but not before preying on her trusting nature in the name of lurid shenanigans and psychological abuse. More than feel the S&M knot tightening, you get the sneaking suspicion that this would be the result if Hugh Hefner had decided to direct Diabolique. Throw in a manipulative sex offender (Simon Andreu) and a racy best friend named Dominique (Susan Scott) with a penchant for porn and you've got a delightfully retrograde giallo that's as childish as it is lurid.

Art School Confidential (2006)

*½/****
starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston
screenplay by Daniel Clowes
directed by Terry Zwigoff

Artschoolconfidentialby Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. When Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff sat down to adapt the former’s graphic serial Ghost World for the screen, they divided up the task generationally, if you will, with the younger Clowes writing the Enid parts and Zwigoff writing the Seymour parts, which themselves have no correlative in the graphic novel. Clowes flew solo on the semi-autobiographical script for the pair’s latest collaboration, Art School Confidential, and the main problem with it is that it’s all Enid and no Seymour. In fact, the film is so relentlessly glib that the Enid doppelgänger who pops up now and again seems gratuitous–and moreover belabours a Ghost World comparison (much like the extended cameo from an unbilled Steve Buscemi) that only finds Art School Confidential wanting. The closest thing the movie has to a moral compass is Joel Moore’s Bardo, one of those career students who becomes the Virgil to freshman Dante Jerome (Max Minghella). Adrift in a sea of poseurs, Jerome struggles in vain to win over his contemporaries, including comely life-drawing model Audrey (Sophia Myles). Meanwhile, a serial strangler trolling the campus for victims not only becomes Jerome’s unwitting muse, but also provides one of his roommates, Vince (Ethan Suplee), with fodder for his thesis film.

Love Me Tender (1956) [Cinema Classics Collection] – DVD

***/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Richard Egan, Debra Paget, Elvis Presley, Robert Middleton
screenplay by Robert Buckner
directed by Robert D. Webb

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. As far as drugs go, Love Me Tender is more pot than heroin. It won’t curl your toes, but you’ll get a smooth, mellow buzz. It’s sort of the perfect film to watch on a Sunday morning on TCM while you’re eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. Love Me Tender doesn’t have a lot of urgency and it moves pretty slowly, yet there’s never a moment in which it’s not compulsively watchable–and at just a shade under ninety minutes, it doesn’t wear out its welcome. Director Robert D. Webb keeps the camera pretty still and shoots the outdoor scenes in long shot, the better to encapsulate the sheer enormity of the under-settled frontier. All this space lends the film a distinctly melancholy feel; there’s something lonely and isolated about the picture. But bittersweet is a flavour, too (a good one), and melancholy is the right attitude for this story and the right attitude for a film titled after Elvis Presley’s tragically romantic hit single “Love Me Tender.” This was the only film that ever killed off Elvis–and it earns the right to do so.

Munich (2005) – DVD

**/**** Image A Sound A
starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciaran Hinds, Mathieu Kassovitz
screenplay by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth
directed by Steven Spielberg

Munichcap

by Walter Chaw Violence begets violence, terrorism begets terrorism, corruption begets corruption, and on and on up and down the self-righteous homily scale. Some time during the third hour of Steven Spielberg's slapdash Munich, the small lessons of this huge picture begin to feel like a ten-penny nail pounded into the middle of your forehead. There's possibly no other director who could have brought this film to fruition with such speed (principal photography began on the day Spielberg's other 2005 release, War of the Worlds, opened in the United States), but for as remarkable as that accomplishment is from a brinkmanship standpoint (about $250M-worth of film in one calendar year? Priceless), the stress begins to show in Munich–the first Spielberg film in memory so hamstrung with amateurish thematic visual concepts that you begin to wonder whether an editor fresh off the bus took over the picture's composition. Still, credit is due Spielberg, almost as well-known for his inability to resist tacking on unearned happy endings as for his savant-like conversance with the medium, for crafting a picture that's morally ambiguous (if only fitfully, and then torturously, so) as well as for daring to whisper that as a direct result of the best intentions of the bloodlust of "civilization" and Old Testament logic employed by the "good guys," the world may actually be a more dangerous place now than it was thirty years ago.