Stellan Skarsgard Page 4

John le Carre's novel is adapted with plenty of inventive style into a remarkably personal thriller, packed with thrills that find suspense in the characters and their predicament rather than pushy movie cliches. It's so sleek and involving that it's easy to ignore the nagging plot holes. We're too busy imagining what we might do in the same situations.

It opens in Marrakech, where poetry professor Perry (Ewan McGregor) and his lawyer wife Gail (Naomie Harris) have gone in an attempt to save their troubled marriage. One evening in a bar, Perry meets the boisterous Dima (Stellan Skarsgard), a Russian who openly admits that he launders money for the mafia. And he asks for Perry's help in delivering information to British intelligence in exchange for his family's safety. Back in London, Perry meets MI6 agent Hector (Damian Lewis), who sees this data as vital to bring down corrupt British politicians. But he has to go rogue to continue on the case, drafting Perry and Gail in to help. Soon they're travelling to France and Switzerland in a dangerous game that puts them in the crosshairs of both a Russian mafia boss (Grigoriy Dobrigyn) and a shifty British MP (Jeremy Northam).

The key point here is that Perry and Gail get involved because they are trying to help Dima's family. This makes everything that happens unusually down-to-earth, with a plot that hinges on the safety of a wife and children rather than the fate of the world. Actually, it's the state of the world that's the villain here, as corrupt Western politicians accept huge money to sidestep the rule of law. Screenwriter Hossein Amini is terrific at keeping the film's focus on the people rather than the plot machinery. And director Susanna White fills the screen with classy touches that are gorgeously shot and edited. The action sequences are unusually clever, avoiding cliches for something more deeply involving (a big shootout is particularly imaginative).

Continue reading: Our Kind Of Traitor Review

Starting with its unlikely origin as an amusement park ride, the Pirates series quickly mushroomed into a sort of meta-pirate film, a vast and whirligig universe unto itself that drew in every possible nautical cliché and legend possible. Thus the first film concentrated on yo-ho-ho-ing, rum-drinking, and general pirate-y scalawaggery. The second roped in Davy Jones and The Flying Dutchman -- not to mention an excess of secondary characters and familial drama. For the third (but not necessarily last, given the teaser it ends with) entry, the bursting-at-the-seams script tosses in a raging maelstrom, an actual trip to Davy Jones' Locker, and even the sea goddess Calypso. Dead Man's Chest showed that more is not always better, with excess just leading to more excess and a general sense of lethargy -- they were just setting us up for the conclusion and marking time until then. At World's End, however, shows that Hollywood excess, when combined with the right combination of actors and an occasionally smart script, can work out quite nicely, thank you very much.

Continue reading: Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End Review

Let's look at the facts: You have Matt Damon as Will Hunting -- apparently the smartest man on the face of the earth who can also kick anyone's ass over breakfast, and has a history of run-ins with the law. Oh no! Affleck is his down-to-earth best bud. Driver, the hoity-toity love interest. Williams and Skarsgård as Hunting's mentors, the guys that rescue him from a prison sentence for assaulting a police officer. And it is made abundantly clear that the film is also about the class stuggle in Boston.

Continue reading: Good Will Hunting Review

Fast forward 12 months. Bruckheimer brings back the costumes, the swordplay, another talented but mildly-experienced director, and his discovery Knightley, this time in a leather S&M get-up. Add the writer of Gladiator. Can the formula work again?

Continue reading: King Arthur Review

Predictability reigns for much of the film, because we've seen the story far too often before. A stranger comes to town where the residents are skeptical of outsiders. She proceeds to go out of her way to ingratiate herself, they finally accept her, and then show their true colors against her of what they fear to inflict on one another due to extended co-habitation. The dysfunction turns into a gang of all versus one, regardless of any normal sense of morality, which they are able to slowly rationalize. On the one hand, the unhurried process through which this evolves respects the fact that nobody changes actions or views over night. But because we know it's going to happen, the path to getting there feels arduous.

Continue reading: Dogville Review

Figgis, who earned a Best Director Oscar nomination for Leaving Las Vegas in 1996, appears to have gone a little funny in the head last year with his inexplicable and nearly dialogue-free The Loss of Sexual Innocence. Now he's fully gone off the deep end with what may be the most ambitious experiment ever: Time Code.

Continue reading: Time Code Review

According to the studio advertising campaign, the 2004 mega-budget version of "King Arthur" is "the untold true story that inspired the legend" -- you know, the factual version in which Arthur is a brooding bore, Lancelot has hip, runway-model facial hair and Guinevere is a half-naked post-feminist warrior hottie.

Borrowing superficially from recent theories about Camelot's origins only as a jumping off point -- producer Jerry "Armageddon" Bruckheimer cares about cool explosions and box office receipts, not historical accuracy -- this commercialized concoction draws its regal hero (played by rising star Clive Owen) as an idealistic, half-Anglo high commander in the Roman army, which is in the midst of abandoning Britannia as a protectorate.

Arthur and his knights (Sarmatian soldiers reluctantly bound to imperial service) take it upon themselves to defend the now unguarded territory against invading hoards of barbarian Saxons from the north. But first they're sent on one last suicidal mission into Saxon territory to rescue a rich Roman family living there for no explored reason.

Continue reading: King Arthur Review

A textbook example of a pretentious art film, "Signs and Wonders" bursts with superfluous symbolism, overcranked tension, deliberately vague performances and proud-to-be-low-budget stylistic idiosyncrasies. But for all its pretense, it has a lot of the same problems that make for bad mainstream movies.

The biggest of those problems is the use of hackneyed plot devices -- like an eavesdropping character misconstruing part of a conversation -- to drive significant portions of the story.

"Signs" is about Alec, a manic-depressive middle-aged American stock analyst (curiously played by Danish Stellan Skarsgard) who habitually sabotages his marriage. He lives comfortably in Athens, Greece, with Marjorie, his U.S. embassy worker wife (curiously played by English Charlotte Rampling) and two kids. But their marriage has become systematic and he's having an affair with a co-worker named Katherine (Deborah Kara Unger, a bona fide American).

Continue reading: Signs & Wonders Review

I can just see the lowest common denominator-minded suits at Warner Bros. salivating over the pitch for "Deep Blue Sea."

"Hey everybody," someone said, "why don't we combine 'Jaws,' 'Alien,' 'The Abyss' and 'Titanic' into some kind of mindless summer blockbuster?" The suits licked their chops. This thing is going to make so much money, they thought.

What I would give to live in a world without these guys. But this isn't that world, so here comes "Deep Blue Sea," something akin to "Jaws 4" on steroids.

Continue reading: Deep Blue Sea Review

Lars von Trier's peculiar compulsion to humiliate his heroines (and by extension the actresses who play them) has finally crescendoed to a deafening din of indiscriminate, exasperating martyrdom in "Dogville," a daring experiment in heightened performance and minimalist filmmaking that is fatally undermined by the Danish writer-director's conceit as a narrator.

His last four movies ("Breaking the Waves," "The Idiots," "Dancer in the Dark" and now "Dogville") have all dealt largely with the psychological (and sometimes physical) torture of vulnerable female protagonists. While his storytelling and cinematic style are almost always compelling, he's never seemed so arbitrary in his sadism than in this allegory of a beautiful, 1930s flapper fugitive hiding from the mob in a ragged, remote, austere Colorado mountain hamlet, where the tiny populace goes from distrustful to accepting to maliciously cruel on little more than von Trier's say-so.

Played with discernible dedication by Nicole Kidman, Grace is a porcelain enigma of self-flagellation so determined to escape some kind of shadowy past that, in exchange for the skeptical township's shelter, she agrees to indentured servitude -- doing handy work, favors and manual labor one hour a day in each of the seven households. She gradually comes earn the friendship of all -- even those most reluctant to accept her.

Continue reading: Dogville Review

Remember that string of "...from hell" psycho flicks in the early 1990s? There was "The Hand That Rocks The Cradle" (nanny from hell) and "Single White Female" (roommate from hell). Well, here's one that was missed at the time: legal guardians from hell.

"The Glass House" is a failed spine-tingler about a teenage girl (Leelee Sobieski) whose parents die in a car crash leaving her and her little brother a $4 million trust -- money their surrogate parents are just itching to get their hands on.

Following the funeral, Ruby and Rhett Baker (Sobieski and Trevor Morgan, "Jurassic Park III") move in with Terry and Erin Glass (Stellan Skarsgard and Diane Lane), seemingly wealthy old friends of their parents who live in a expensive, ultra-modern, ultra-stylish, windows-and-concrete house in the Malibu hills.

Continue reading: The Glass House Review