Movie Box Review

 

THE DESCENDANTS:  Worth A Ticket - Flawed But Heartfelt

It's taken an unaccountable 7 years for Alexander Payne to follow up Sideways, the biggest hit of his career,  with THE DESCENDANTS, which will hit theatres in time for a serious awards season push in late November.  Sideways and Payne's earlier Election are two of the best films anyone's made in the past dozen years (and his other features Citizen Ruth and About Schmidt are hardly slouches either), setting the bar pretty high for his next film.  That may be why The Descendants, while pleasing and dramatically satisfying, feels a little bit soft.

The film, written by Payne with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (they're better known as actors--Rash plays the mad Dean on Community), and based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, is set in Hawaii, where Matt King (George Clooney) is facing multiple crises.  Matt's wife has been horribly injured in a boating accident, and lies in a coma, with the decision of whether or not to end her life up to him.  Whatever he decides, he's now singlehandedly responsible for raising their two daughters:  the angry, rebellious Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and her younger sister Scottie (Amara Miller).  Meanwhile, as one of the heirs to a huge tract of family land that is being sought for development, he also has to cast a critical vote as to whether to sell his family's legacy or pass up a huge amount of money.

And his travails are just beginning:  he learns (this is revealed in the film's trailer, so no spoiler alert) that his wife had been having a serious affair at the time of her accident, further complicating his feelings about her and his family.  Then there's Alexandra's moronic boyfriend, who she insists accompany them everywhere...

All of this provides plenty of rich material for Payne and his co-writers, and the film moves smoothly between exasperated comedy and strong drama.  As you'd expect with its Hawaiian setting, The Descendants looks wonderful too.  Phedon Papamichael provides lush, gorgeous photography, the settings and landscapes could be provided by the Hawaii Tourist Bureau, and there's good use of native music on the soundtrack.  The acting is of a very high standard--apart from those named above, Judy Greer (especially) and Matthew Lillard are very fine as key figures in what turns out to be Matt's wife's secret life, Robert Forster is priceless as his father-in-law, and Beau Bridges plays one of Matt's cousins and a co-heir of the land.

And yet somehow The Descendants doesn't quite have the impact of Payne's best films.  It's a little too accomplished for its own good, typified by Clooney's presence in the starring role.  Here's a wildly inconsistent statement:  Clooney gives a wonderful performance, one of his best, and it's easy to imagine him as a strong contender for the Best Actor Oscar, yet he's fundamentally wrong for the role.  Unlike Paul Giamatti in Sideways or Matthew Broderick in Election, Clooney is so un-average, so inherently glamorous, that the idea of Matt as an ordinary guy never fits--you have to keep reminding yourself that Matt is in trouble, and he won't be able to just glide over his problems.  (Imagine Giamatti playing Matt--his recent role in Win Win wasn't all that different a character--and you have a completely different movie, just as Win Win would have been with Clooney in the lead.) This lowers the emotional stakes, and makes the movie lighter and more escapist than it seems intended to be. 

There are other flaws--Alexandra's boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) is a cartoon until the writers decide to unconvincingly give him depth late in the game, there's never any doubt what Matt is ultimately going to do with his family land--and the overall effect is of an entertaining picture that doesn't go quite deep enough.

The Descendants is very enjoyable, and it could well supplant Sideways' $71M as Payne's biggest hit; no doubt it will be on the short list of Oscar candidates.  There's certainly nothing wrong with that.  But it's probably the first movie Alexander Payne has made that could be called "comfortable," and it's a little bit disappointing to see him settle for pleasing the crowd.

Here are capsule summaries of all this year's SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival reviews, arranged more or less in order of preference.  Click on each title for the full review, and the complete list of all the reviews is here. 

SHAME:  Audiences who go to the new film by Steve McQueen (not that one) for its certain NC-17 rating are in for a disappointment:  Michael Fassbinder and Carey Mulligan play tortured siblings who, in very different ways, use sex to salve their emotional wounds, and the result is far from erotic.  Both actors give scorching performances in an utterly uncompromising work of art. 

TAKE THIS WALTZ:  Sarah Polley's follow-up to Away From Her is another elegiac story of troubled marriage and the quest for romantic fulfillment, this time rooted in younger characters and a rich, yet more prosaic reality.  Michelle Williams is brilliant, which is no surprise, but that Seth Rogen keeps step with her is something of a shock.  Polley's visual and aural filmmaking skills have only grown since her directing debut. 

MONEYBALL:  What seemed to be the impossibly abstract subject of a baseball team's change in player acquisition strategies becomes a mostly thrilling movie in the hands of screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, and director Bennett Miller.  Brad Pitt has never been better than as the A's General Manager Billy Beane, and he and Jonah Hill as his go-to guy make the most adorable acting team of the year.

 

50/50:  It was a remarkably good festival for Seth Rogen, who's an integral part of this often hilarious, and as often moving and truthful, fictionalized story of his real-life friendship with screenwriter Will Reiser, who was stricken with cancer while in his 20s.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays the fictional version of Reiser, and scores his first great leading role in Jonathan Levine's pitch-perfect comedy-drama.

 

YOUR SISTER'S SISTER:  Lynn Shelton follows Humpday with another appealing, incisive and very funny mumblecore dramatic farce about relationships.  Mark Duplass, as a guy who finds himself in uncomfortable positions with two sisters, is a cornerstone of this kind of semi-improvisational film, but the surprise is that Rosemary DeWitt and Emily Blunt, refugees from the land of scripts, form such a marvelous ensemble with him as the sisters in question.

DRIVE:  Nicolas Winding Refn's existential crime movie is studied and referential, but that doesn't make it (much) less thrilling.  Ryan Gosling is a charismatic Driver With No Name, Albert Brooks a shockingly good villain, the chase scenes are both low-key and spectacular, and watch out for the violence, because Refn may be quoting, but he isn't kidding.

 

THE DESCENDANTS:  Alexander Payne's follow-up, after 7 long years, to Sideways is an entertaining and emotionally satisfying story that isn't quite up to his highest standards.  George Clooney manages to be marvelous in the lead and yet somewhat miscast, as an ordinary guy who finds out his comatose wife had been having an affair, and Shailene Woodley, as his angry teen daughter, is a huge find.

BUTTER:  It's Little Miss Sunshine meets Smile meets Election meets a Funny Or Die sketch, and it all works better than you'd expect.  Jennifer Garner plays Sarah Palin Michelle Bachmann a ruthless competitor in a butter carving competition, who finds that her most dangerous foe is an angelic 10-year old
African-American foster child, and Olivia Wilde has all the best lines as a wickedly smart stripper with a grudge..

 

TEN YEAR:  Familiar territory from writer-director Jamie Linden, but very well done, as a high school class gathers for its 10-year reunion.  The wonderful ensemble cast includes Channing Tatum as the guy who still has a thing for his high school sweetheart (Rosario Dawson), Chris Pratt as the one who becomes an imbecile when he drinks (and Ari Graynor as the wife who has to control him), Justin Long and Max Minghella as the two who never grew up, and Kate Mara as the girl whose old boyfriend (Oscar Isaac) had a huge hit song that she's somehow never managed to hear. 

THE IDES OF MARCH:  The other George Clooney movie at the festival--the one he directed himself-- (not to mention the other Ryan Gosling movie) makes substantial changes in the original play Farragut North that aren't for the better, but still has some crackling scenes and an amazing cast:  apart from the two leads, Paul Giamatti, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marisa Tomei, and Evan Rachel Wood give a collective acting class.

 

THE RAID:  There's hardly any substance to this Indonesian action movie, but who cares?  A small squad of double-crossed cops have to try to survive their way up to an apartment building's top floor, where a crime boss is waiting for them, and practically every room of the place houses a gasp-inducing, to-the-death fight scene.  One bit with a broken light-bulb will forever change the way you look at fixtures.

 

THE ARTIST:  Michel Hazanavicius' charming oddity:  a brand-new, almost completely silent movie (also in black and white and shot in the old 1:1.33 TV set aspect ratio) about, well, the end of silent movies.  To some extent it's getting overpraised for its sheer audacity, but no question that it's a beautifully realized curiosity, with a marvelous star performance by Jean Dujardin at its center.

 

ALBERT NOBBS:  This year's movie for people who've been missing James Ivory's films of the 1980s and 90s.  Rodrigo Garcia's costume drama features Glenn Close, in a performance that's a model of restraint, as an Irish butler in the late 19th Century who's an ordinary man in almost every way... except for his actually being a woman.  With Janet McTeer as another impersonator, and a fine supporting cast that includes Brandan Gleeson, Mia Wasikowska and Aaron Johnson. 

THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH:  Pawel Pawlikowski makes lovely movies in miniature like My Summer of Love, and here he turns to a more brain-twisting mode.  Ethan Hawke is a troubled English professor who's come to France to try and see his young daughter, but when his distraught ex-wife won't let him anywhere near the girl, he has to take a mysteriously menacing job for a shady landlord, and then there's something odd about the new woman in his life (Kristin Scott Thomas as her enigmatically sleek best).

 

SLEEPLESS NIGHT:  The US remake of this French thriller should be even better (assuming they don't screw it up), but the concept is already irresistible:  a crooked cop's theft of coke from a crime boss leads to his son being kidnapped, and when the cop tries to return the drugs and get the boy back, he's double-and triple-crossed, and has to make his way, Die Hard-like, through the villian's massive nightclub complex, desperately trying to save his son's life and his own.  The words "non-stop action" scarcely do justice to the pace.

DAMSELS IN DISTRESS:  After 13 years, the Whit Stillman of Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco is back, more epigrammatic and idiosyncratic than ever.  Greta Gerwig plays the leader of a group of college girls who dress circa Three Coins In the Fountain, attempt to dissuade possible suicides by feeding them donuts, and have a policy of only dating stupid boys.  Oh, and there are dance numbers.  Stillman is an acquired taste, but there's no one else in the world of film like him.

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN:  One of the few large acquisitions of the festival (bought by CBS Films reportedly for around $5M), this is a likable but fairly bland romantic comedy with a title that isn't metaphorical:  Ewan McGregor plays a fisheries expert recruited by a Yemeni sheik's representative (Emily Blunt) to introduce salmon to the Yemen River for fishing purposes.  Once it's clear that McGregor and Blunt's characters rub each other the wrong way, there's no suspense about where it's all going, but the movie's secret weapon is Kristin Scott Thomas as a government PR woman; she makes the most routine dialogue sound like a succession of classic zingers,

 

HICK:  Melodrama aplenty in Derick Martini's follow-up to Lymelife.  Chloe Moretz from Kick-Ass plays a 13-year old in the 1970s who goes on the road and learns far more about life than she ever wished to know.  Eddie Redmayne and a surprisingly effective Blake Lively are her teachers, and the result is pretty rough--and according to the co-screenwriter, partly autobiographical, which is scary. 

360:  The new film by Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) is an expertly made drama about very little.  The title refers both to the film's circular structure--character A meets character B, who has an encounter with character C, all the way till Z meets A--and to the Earth, around which the various stories are set.  Some fine acting by an ensemble that includes Anthony Hopkins, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law and many more, but 360 can also refer to the dimensions of a handsome, beautifully scored Zero.

RAMPART:  Oren Moverman's film, co-written with novelist James Ellroy, starts out strong but then goes nowhere.  Woody Harrelson heads a first-rate cast (Robin Wright, Sigourney Weaver, Steve Buscemi, Anne Heche, and Cynthia Nixon, among others) as a cop who's both victimizer and victim at the time of the LA Rampart scandal; the plotline only gets murkier and less involving as the movie goes on.

THE DEEP BLUE SEA:  Heartfelt but dull.  Terence Davies' film of Terence Rattigan's mid-20th Century play is all misery and repressed emotion; when the most exciting sequence in a movie is a failed suicide attempt, it's time to find a Michael Bay picture.  Rachel Weisz and Simon Russell Beale give fully realized performances as two of the miserable, even though their faces are often sunk in cinematographic darkness.

INTO THE ABYSS:  A fairly straightforward documentary by Werner Herzog, about some senseless killings, the equally senseless execution of one of the killers, and the sadness it all causes to everyone involved, from the families to the prison guards.  The film, composed mostly of talking head interviews, seems to accomplish what it intended to do, but without any particular revelations.

RESTLESS:  A very twee piece of death-fetish hokum from Gus Van Sant.  Mia Wasikowska has the kind of brain tumor that kills you while causing no physical effect whatsoever apart from a pixie haircut; her boyfriend, played by Henry Hopper (Dennis' son), attends strangers' funerals for fun and has as his sidekick the ghost of a dead Japanese kamikaze pilot.  Everyone involved needed to throw out their DVDs of Harold and Maude.

PEACE, LOVE AND MISUNDERSTANDING:  If the idea of Jane Fonda as a pot-smoking, anti-war, moon-worshipping, free-love grandma living in Woodstock, NY amuses you, here's your movie.  Add to that Catherine Keener as Fonda's conservative, disapproving, tight-lipped daughter who comes for a visit when her marriage falls apart and--who would have guessed?--gradually loosens up, and you have a TV pilot for a series that please God will never see the air.  The saddest sight of all is Elizabeth Olsen, brilliant in Martha Marcy May Marlene, reduced to playing a vegetarian who falls for a sensitive butcher.

W.E.:  Madonna's 2-hour ad for various clothing, furniture and jewelry designers is about as swankly idiotic as a movie can be.  Technically it's about a mystical bond that forms between a very rich, dissatisfied New York psychiatrist's wife in the 1990s, and Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom Edward VII abdicated the throne, but really it's a piece of conspicuous consumption porn about the glorious things all of them wear and own, and how sad it is to be rich and famous.  

THE INCIDENT:  One of those "based on a true story" horror cheapies:  a very long hour spent with an aspiring rock band in the late 1980s who work in the kitchen of an asylum for the criminally insane, while we wait for the damn electricity to go out so they can start being slaughtered.  Which, in the last half-hour, they gruesomely are.  Fun!

THE MOTH DIARIES:  A dismal gothic thriller that would be discarded by the CW without even paying for the optional polish.  Mary Harron's dull, incomprehensible story is set at a girls' school, where our heroine (Sarah Bolger) is targeted by the vampiric new Mean Girl (Lily Cole), who speaks like she's reading cue cards and attracts (or maybe is?) many moths. 

TWIXT:  A special place of honor belongs to Francis Ford Coppola, for bringing Toronto the worst piece of work in his entire long and distinguished career.  A stew of musicvideo visual techniques from 1995, incoherent plotting, acting that resembles a horror parody from SCTV, occasional 3D, and some overt self-parody.  Coppola explained that it all came from a dream he'd had, but he turned it into an audience nightmare.

Jim Field Smith's comedy BUTTER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, ambitiously makes a play for both the heartwarming indie Little Miss Sunshine audience and the satire-minded Election crowd.  That may be one play too many, but the movie is worth seeing anyway.

Jason A Micallef's first produced script is set in the unfamiliar (for those of us not hailing from the midwest, at least) world of competitive butter sculpting.  In the small Iowa town where the story is set, Bob Pickler (Ty Burrell) is a local legend, winner of the local contest for 15 consecutive years as the creator of epic artworks that include a life-size recreation of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" and another inspired by Schindler's List.  Bob is so unbeatable, in fact, that his town has decided, in the most respectful possible way, to disqualify him from further competition.  

This is unacceptable to Bob's wife Laura (Jennifer Garner, essentially playing Reese Witherspoon's Election character in middle age), an unstoppable engine of ambition; when it becomes clear that Bob really won't be allowed to compete, Laura decides to enter the fray herself.  Her competition consists of Bob's biggest fan (Kristen Schaal), a stripper with a very specific grudge against the Pickler family (Olivia Wilde)--and most dangerous of all, a preternaturally composed 10-year old African-American foster child not accidentally named Destiny (Yara Shahidi).  When it becomes clear that Destiny has a natural gift for butter sculpting, for Laura the war is on.

When Butter sticks to the personalities of the butter sculptors and those around them, it can be very funny and even heartfelt; it sometimes recalls Michael Ritchie's 1976 smalltown beauty pageant gem Smile.  Destiny's wary relationship with her new foster parents (Rob Corddry and Alicia Silverstone) is lovely; Shahidi is charming,  and Corddry may be indie film's most lovable dad since J.K. Simmons in Juno.  (The two of them have an irresistible bit--you can see it's improvised in the outtakes that accompany the end credits--where Corddry tries to help the girl gather the courage to enter the contest by trading the most horrible possible outcomes with her.)  Olivia Wilde has all the best lines (not to mention the best storyline) as the stripper, and she's got genuine comic spark to go along with her almost-invisible outfits.  Burrell pretty much plays his Modern Family part (not that there's anything wrong with that), and Hugh Jackman turns up late in the game and overplays his silly part, but Garner--also a producer of the film--seizes her role by the throat and plays her with absolute conviction, fully realizing both Laura's fiendishness and the desperation that drives her.  

Butter gets into trouble when it tries to shoehorn itself into political allegory.  (Instead of Smile, its model seems to become Nasty Habits, a 1977 flop that transferred Watergate into a nunnery.)  The picture's opening sequence pushes the parallels hard, with Garner instantly identifiable as a Palin/Bachmann clone, and after establishing Bob Pickler as an apolitical blank, having him mix his DaVinci and Spielberg sculptures with a Newt Gingrich portrait feels like an out-of-character gag.  Smith's only other feature film was the cruddy comedy She's Out Of My League, and subtlety isn't his strong point--giving him material that calls for a "You get it?  Do you get it?" emphasis is a bad idea.  (There's also a clumsily obvious post-production alteration to the third-act plot, effected with voice-over narration.  It's easy enough to see why the change was made--the eternal Hollywood need for characters to be likable--but it weakens the story, and the slipshod way it's been done doesn't help.)

Butter is a mixed bag, and its efforts to Make A Statement tend to melt away more often than they work.  When the movie is content to simply depict its slightly mad millieu and daffy characters, though, it's a sharp, satisfying entertainment.

I wasn't aware that the Toronto Film Festival showed TV pilots until I caught a screening of PEACE, LOVE & MISUNDERSTANDING.  As a pilot, Peace certainly has its appeal, with a strong cast that includes Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and rising star Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), and a reliable premise that can furnish reliably heartwarming laughs for seasons to come...

Sorry, this just in--apparently Peace, Love & Misunderstanding isn't a pilot at all?  It's a full-fledged feature film?  Directed by Bruce Beresford, whose films include Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy?  Oh.  Well, never mind.

As someone who's sat in a few TV development meetings, I can say the mistake would have been an honest one:  Peace is as contrived and predictable as any series you've tried to watch because of the cast and then abandoned.  The set-up alone is cringe-inducing:  when her marriage breaks up, tense, hard-driving and politically-conservative lawyer Diane (Keener) packs her teen children Zoe and Jake (Olsen and Nat Wolff) into the car and goes with them to upstate New York, where her hippy-dippy, pot-smoking, anti-war, moon-worshipping, free-love mom Grace (Jane Fonda) lives.  Wait, did I say "upstate New York"?  Surely it's possible to make the location more of a contrivance in and of itself--that's right, she lives in Woodstock!

Once there, the script by Joseph Muszyski and Christina Mengert makes sure that everything you would expect to happen does.  (Spoiler Alert, I guess.)  Diane loosens up and finds love with sensitive carpenter/songwriter Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan); vegetarian Zoe finds love with butcher Cole (Chace Crawford); budding filmmaker Jake not only finds love with cute coffee-shop girl Tara (Marissa O'Donnell), but makes an acclaimed, loving film about his crazy family.  And of course Diane and Grace, who have been estranged for years, soften to one another.  To set up the series, by the end of the pilot--sorry, I keep making that mistake--Diane has moved in with Jude, so now she lives in the same small town as her mom.

This would all be unspeakable if the cast weren't so skilled; as it is, the picture is amiably bland.  It might have been more fun if Fonda had winked at the fact that her character is a bizarro version of her own 60s persona, but she stays professionally in character, while Keener can play these frosty types in her sleep.  (The sad part is watching Olsen, brilliant in Martha Marcy May, reduced to pouting because her cute boyfriend doesn't understand her.)  The movie delivers a few laughs--it played well with the Toronto audience--and it's friendly enough; Beresford can't possibly save the material, but he's been doing this for a long time, and the picture flows from A to B to C and so on through the entire alphabet.

As a film festival presentation, Peace, Love & Misunderstanding is fairly embarrassing, aside from the cast; the good news is that I understand ABC Family is always looking for new projects.

When the inevitable US remake of the French thriller SLEEPLESS NIGHT arrives, it'll benefit from some sharper dialogue (assuming the subtitles in Toronto were fully translating the original), a bit more characterization and a slightly more varied tone.  But the framework already exists for a solid action hit.

The picture begins as a variant of another recent French thriller, Point Blank.  This time the hero Vincent (Tomer Sisley) isn't a complete innocent:  he's either a crooked cop or a good cop pretending to be crooked--it's never entirely clear, and frankly it doesn't matter much; either way he causes a mess. This time, the loved one kidnapped by the bad guys isn't his pregnant wife, it's his teen son.  But otherwise the set-up leads to the same place:  a crime boss takes the boy hostage and tells the hero he has to complete a task for them if he wants to see his son alive, which means returning the bag of cocaine he violently grabbed from them in the first reel.

Sleepless Night, though, takes that premise and melds it with another indebted to Die Hard:  one renegade eluding his foes in a limited space.  Vincent has to deliver the coke to the giant nightclub complex owned by the crime boss, which he's more than willing to do--but naturally things don't go so smoothly, and the dope is stolen from him before he can hand it over.  Soon Vincent has to make his way all over the crowded, deafeningly loud nightclub, from disco to private club to high-class restaurant to kitchen to poolroom to offices, desperately trying to find the drugs, his son and/or the kidnapper, all the time pursued by a variety of opponents on both sides of the law.  Oh, and did I mention that he got stabbed when he stole the coke in the first place?  So he's also bleeding while all this is going on.

Sleepless Night is exhilaratingly exciting stuff, and Jardin (who also wrote the script with Nicolas Saada) does an expert job of keeping the logistics and plotline in order.  The picture is a nonstop race against time, with some wild action sequences, notably a kitchen battle so brutal it becomes black comedy.  Because the nightclub is virtually the co-star of the picture, Jardin wisely made an unconventional choice for his cameraman:  Tom Stern, Clint Eastwood's house cinemtographer for the past decade, who'd never done a foreign film before.  The production design by Hubert Pouille also deserves special note, as does the unrelenting editing by Marco Cave and Christophe Pinel.  

As noted, the script does a better job of moving the action along than of developing strong characters, and the dialogue is on the cartoonish side.  But that's why God made rewrites.  There's also a small diminishment of suspense around two-thirds of the way through, as Vincent and his pursuers chase through the same set of locales in what becomes a bit of a loop, leading to a certain repetitiveness (although Jardin pulls out of it for a terrifically crazy ending).  The picture isn't ready for Brad Pitt or Ryan Gosling just yet.  But it's damn close:  Sleepless Night is already a long night's worth of fun.  

Mary Harron's career has previously included such fascinatingly transgressive films as I Shot Andy Warhol, American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page, which is the only sensible explanation for the inclusion of her new, dreadful sub-CW gothic thriller THE MOTH DIARIES in this year's Toronto Film Festival.

Diaries, which Harron adapted from a (reportedly more nuanced) novel by Rachel Klein, makes the Twilight movies look like high art.  The familiar setting is an all-girls school, which is a refuge for Rebecca (Sarah Bolger) after the suicide of her poet father.  There she has good friends, and is able to relax into her old life.  But inevitably an interloper arrives:  the charismatic, ethereal Ernessa (Lily Cole).  It's never entirely clear what Ernessa really is--she seems to be a cross between a Mean Girl, a ghost and a vampire, and then there are those clusters of moths--but one by one, she starts driving Rebecca's friends away, and Rebecca becomes convinced that she's literally sapping the life from Rebecca's best friend Lucy (Sarah Gadon).  Rebecca tries desperately to convince everyone of Ernessa's evil powers, but--wait for it--no one will believe her!

There's nothing at all wrong with hokum if it's staged well and performed convincingly, but you'd be hard-pressed to recognize Moth Diaries as the work of a veteran filmmaker.  The acting is hit-or-miss:  Bolger is fine as the troubled heroine, but while Lilly Cole has the kind of otherworldly beauty that suits a supernatural being, her line readings are sometimes more stilted than even her character justifies.  Scott Speedman shows up as the only male teacher at the school, in a role that may have had a point (other than providing literary references to "Dracula" and "Carmilla") before the movie was edited, but certainly doesn't now, and most of the other characters are merely types (the girl with the wild hair?  She's the rebel). Presumably Harron was drawn to the material because of its intertwining of relationships among young women with a supernatural element, but in a post-Buffy the Vampire Slayer world, that's hardly an original metaphor, and it's been handled far better elsewhere.  

Moth Diaries has little or no suspense, making for low suspension of disbelief and causing the cliches and coincidences to feel even more obvious.  Whatever the mythology was meant to be, it's so obscure and confusing that even the supposedly shocking moments provoke little more than a confused shrug.  The very fine cinematographer Declan Quinn (Rachel Getting Married, In America) is behind the camera, but there's nothing particularly atmospheric or interesting about the movie's look, and despite an 85-minute running time and action taking place over most of a year, the movie feels slow and listless.

Toronto's film festival shows hundreds of films each year, and there are bound to be a few shambles; Harron, herself a Canadian native, may have gotten a hometown vote from the selection committee.  Her Moth Diaries is best kept under lock and key.

If you were going to describe the films of Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth) in one word, that word would not be "dynamic."  Or "kinetic."  Or, well, "exciting."  Davies directs stately tableaux, impressive and sometimes moving, but rooted in nostalgia and regret.

Which is why choosing him to direct THE DEEP BLUE SEA, based on Terence Rattigan's 1952 play (previously filmed in 1955 with Vivien Leigh), was somewhere between inspired and doomed.  Rattigan's play is all post-war repression, unrequited love and misery; Davies' film fully realizes those themes, and provides little else.

Deep Blue Sea tells of a romantic triangle where all three parties manage to be dismally unhappy.  When the story begins, Hester (Rachel Weisz) has left her stodgy, older husband William (Simon Russell Beale) for the younger and more dashing Freddie (Tom Hiddleston).  William truly loves Hester, but arouses no passion in her; Hester is obsessively in love with Freddie, but he has only superficial feelings for her.  Freddie, too, is depressed, because apart from the clinging Hester, he knows his life peaked as a WWII pilot, and now he drinks and treats her badly.  To give an idea of how depressing all this is, the play and movie begin with Hester's failed suicide attempt because Freddie had forgotten her birthday the night before (and it doesn't get any more fun after that).  

Davies makes the experience even grimmer than it has to be.  The film has been shot (by Florian Hoffmeister) in oppressive semi-darkness, which accurately reflects the mood of the characters (and probably also relates to the post-war rationing and hardship of the time) to a fault.  There is much lugubrious singing of old wartime songs, and the production design is pinched and despondent.  Deep Blue Sea has been compared by some to David Lean's film of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter, but while that, too, was a tribute to stiff-upper-lip emotion, it also had a swoony romanticism; Deep Blue Sea, taking place after the romance has already curdled, is just sad.

Weisz and Beale give very strong performances, even if there's limited scope in the film's interpretation of their characters--both make us feel the terrible emptiness of their lives and longing.  I don't know if it's possible in 2011 to give life to a bounder like Freddie, but Davies and Hiddleston don't manage to find any depth in him, and the other characters fade into the brownish background.  

The Deep Blue Sea seems to be exactly the film its director intended, plumbing the depths of human woe and unhappiness.  Its agonized depiction of despair, however, make it an acquired taste.

As has been reported, there really was an ambulance outside the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto after the midnight premiere of Alexandre Courtes' THE INCIDENT, there to rescue at least one person who had fainted during the movie.  Of course, this may just mean that Toronto Film Festival patrons have delicate sensibilities--an idea supported by the fact that someone also fainted at the premiere of Shame (apparently because of the film's one violent scene, not the sex).  The Incident has some wild violence toward the end, but it's not nearly scary or shocking enough to be a menace to the public health.

The movie is an extremely slow-burning thriller.  It's one of those "based on a true story" things, set in Washington state in the late 1980s, where all 4 members of an aspiring rock band (Rupert Evans, Kenny Doughty, Joseph Kennedy, Richard Brake) work together in the kitchen of an asylum for the criminally insane.  We watch in much too painstaking detail (and even padded out, the picture only runs 85 minutes) as the buddies bicker, cook, plan for their next gig, talk about the menu and the food delivery schedule, and so on.  (We only see the personal life of one of the men, which in movie terms tells you something about how things will go once the violence begins.)  Courtes, working from a script by Jerome Fansten, is careful to show us all the security--the thick plexiglass, multiple locks and sliding metal doors that separate the kitchen, with its sharp objects, ovens and other potential weapons, from the inmates--and the muttering hostility of the patients.

Finally, when we've almost given up on the possibility of seeing people get butchered, a lightning storm fries the asylum's electrical system, and every single inmate instantly becomes a homicidal maniac.  Even here, there are lots of scenes of our heroes plodding down one identical hallway after another, laboriously discovering that the doors are unlocked (except the ones that could get them out) and the guards are being slaughtered.  Finally, in the last reel or so, the lunatics start inventively murdering our heroes, and The Incident offers a few minutes of dirty thrills before it ends.

This is Courtes' film debut after directing a host of music videos, but The Incident doesn't even have the superficial slickness we associate with that kind of work; it's cheap-looking and the gore, while sometimes very graphic, is low-rent.   The movie's been acquired by IFC Midnight, which typically mounts a token theatrical release but concentrates on pay-per-view and cable, and that's probably where this belongs--remember, if you see it on the channel guide, no need to tune in until the last half hour.  And don't worry, it's unlikely you'll need to have the local hospital alerted that an ambulance might be necessary--unless you, too, are a film festival delicate flower.

Pawel Pawlikowski is a filmmaker whose name deserves to be better known: his films Last Resort and My Summer of Love are small but beautifully realized stories of intricate human emotion. His new picture The Woman In the Fifth, is in a somewhat different mode, edging toward genre, but it continues to display his skill at detail.

The Woman In the Fifth, with a script by Pawlikowski based on Douglas Kennedy's book, is set in Paris, where writer and literature lecturer Tom (Ethan Hawke), freshly out of hospital for reasons never fully explained, has gone to see his young daughter. His French ex-wife has no intention of letting him near the girl, and Tom, who is robbed shortly after getting into town, has to find a job in order to have any contact at all with his daughter. He moves into a flophouse and takes a strange position with the manager, serving as a kind of doorman in a mysterious other building the man owns. Tom also strikes up a dangerous relationship with the manager's lovely Polish mistress (Joanna Kulig).

Meanwhile, a chance encounter brings Tom in contact with Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas), widow of a Hungarian poet and his one-time translator. Margit offers her self to Tom, but there's something vaguely disturbing about her. Mysterious things begin to happen to Tom, gaps in logic and disquieting oddities, as he tries to get closer to his daughter.

To say more would risk ruining Woman's compact surprises. It's not impossible to see where the film is going, but Pawilkowski's careful handling of the material makes the journey satisfying. (The room and building where Tom carries out his strangely menacing doorman job have a suggestive decor and sound design worthy of Polanski.)

Hawke is very good in a role that had to be carefully played, and Thomas is wonderfully enigmatic as the woman in his life (she lives in the 5th arrondisement in Paris, hence the title). As with Pawlikowski's other films, Woman In the Fifth works in miniature (it only runs 83 minutes), and doesn't reach for big thrills or melodrama. In its quiet way, it's a tremendously accomplished piece of work.

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One of the enduring questions of Madonna's illustrious quarter-century career is how someone so brilliant in managing every other facet of her persona has consistently made such terrible decisions when it comes to movies.  It's the one medium where she's never succeeded, and even when she's occasionally done something right, she instantly follows it with another foul-up:  her bright debut in Desperately Seeking Susan preceded the famously dreadful Shanghai Surprise, and her decent performance in the hugely hyped Evita led to the even more unwatchableThe Next Big Thing.  Her last lead role was in the atrocious Swept Away, and now she's moved on to directing.  Her debut Filth and Wisdom came and went with little notice, but this time she's back on a much bigger scale:  W.E., which played the Toronto Film Festival last night.

W.E. refers to the initials of Wallis Simpson and the King who abdicated his throne for her, Edward VII of England, and the movie purports some kind of mystical tie between Simpson (Andrea Riseborough, unrecognizable from her meek waitress in Brighton Rock) and Wally, the dissatisfied wife (Abbie Cornish) of a Manhattan psychiatrist (Richard Coyle) in 1999, when the Windsors' possessions were being sold at auction at Sotheby's.  To put it bluntly, the script by Madonna and Alek Keshishian (director of her concert documentary Truth or Dare) makes no sense whatsoever, and if Madonna's name weren't attached to it, it's almost inconceivable that the picture could ever have been made.  From the intense whitewashing of Edward's (James D'Arcy) historical Nazi sympathies, to Wallis Simpson being some sort of fairy godmother to Wally, to Wally's romance novel affair with a Russian security officer at Sotheby's (Oscar Isaac, who's been popping up all over the festival in impressively diverse roles)--W.E. is a stranger to logic.

W.E. is an awful movie, all right, but it's often a watchably awful one.  The picture's been described as resembling a music video, but that's not really accurate (except for one scene--I think it was Wally's hallucination but who knows--where Wallis dances to a contemporary song even though it's the 1930s, at an amphetamine-fueled party)--it's much more like one of those videos fashion magazines and design houses do these days, for posting on their websites and in stores.  Madonna knows her way around a camera move, and although the movie may have been designed instead of directed, it's been designed within a milimeter of its life:  cinematographer Hagen Bogdanski (his films include The Young Victoria), production designer Martin Childs, and costume designer Arianne Phillips seem to have been told to spare no expense and pay no attention to objective reality (the security guy's insanely swanky apartment would probably go for mid-seven figures, which should spur a rush for jobs at Sotheby's). 

Apart from its visual thrills, W.E. offers little, except for authors of future dissertations who choose to analyze Madonna's interest in the isolation and emotional pain of rich women in the public eye.  Her and Keshishian's dialogue is like a knife in the ears, and even the very talented actors on display like Cornish aren't given anyone recognizably human to play.  The movie feels like, and essentially is, the ultimate vanity production.

People complained that Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette was superficial, but they didn't know what superficial looked like:  W.E. makes Coppola's film feel like it was made by Robert Bresson.  This kind of high-priced, unrestrained idiocy doesn't come along many times in a lifetime, so don't resist the temptation to take a look.  And for Madonna, it's never too late to consider a segue into animation.

Lynn Shelton's Humpday in 2009 was one of the most engaging pictures to come out of the mumblecore movement ("mumblecore," for the uninitiated = ultra-low-budget, small scale film with dialogue mostly improvised by the actors), and her new film YOUR SISTER'S SISTER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last night, confirms that she's probably the most mainstream (that's not an insult) of the subgenre's practitioners.

Shelton, more than most of the mumblecore filmmakers, seems to be trying to find a middle ground between pure indie and popular moviemaking (after Humpday, she directed an episode of Mad Men, which with Matthew Weiner's iron-bound control over every detail, had to be a very different kind of experience).  The premise of Your Sister's Sister is commercial enough to be a mainstream comedy:  Jack (Mark Duplass, himself a mumblecore auteur with fine pictures like The Puffy Chair and Cyrus to his credit) is still trying to get over the loss of his brother a year before.  His brother's longtime love Iris (Emily Blunt) is Jack's best friend, and she lends him her family's cabin so he can have some alone time for introspection.  When he gets there, though, he finds Iris' half-sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) there--she's a vegan lesbian who's just broken up with her own longtime lover.  The two are vulnerable, increasingly drunk, and... well, what you'd expect happens.  The next one to show up unexpectedly, of course, is Iris, and now the three are all hiding huge secrets from each other.  

The mumblecore technique of long, improvisatory takes which are then edited into a coherent story can yield moments of startling reality, but often the films are also meandering and unfocused.  Your Sister's Sister, though, is bright and witty from the start (a hilarious scene where Jack disrupts the 1-year memorial gathering for his brother).  Duplass's expertise with this isn't a surprise, considering his loads of experience, but Blunt and DeWitt are better known for their scripted abilities, and they manage the new challenge wonderfully; the scenes of the two sisters together, especially, are filled with believably intimate moments.

For any good film produced in this style, the editor is worthy of special praise, and here that belongs to Nat Sanders, who also did Humpday, as well as the excellent The Freebie, with Duplass's wife Katie Aselton behind the camera.  (A literal parenthetical note:  The League, FX's comedy about a group of friends in a fantasy football league, stars Duplass and Aselton and may be the most underappreciated comedy on TV.)  The photography by Benjamin Kasulke (also a Freebie/Humpday veteran) is quite handsome for the tiny budget these pictures permit.  Ultimately, though, this is Shelton's show, and as she did in Humpday, she manages to take a contrived situation and treat it with great humanity and appreciation for detail, while not ignoring the opportunity for big laughs.  

Your Sister's Sister isn't going to do Bridesmaids business, and it moves at a pace that some audiences may find careful, but it's a funny, satisfying comedy-drama that's true to its process while delivering entertainment to a group larger than the people who made it.  It's one of the festival's pleasant surprises.

Oren Moverman's first film as a director, The Messenger, was a beautifully contained, emotionally detailed story about soldiers assigned to deliver tragic news to the families of the deceased.  In his new film RAMPART, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Moverman is more ambitious and, unfortunately, a victim of the sophomore jinx.

This time, Moverman co-wrote his film with celebrated novelist James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential, among many others), and for better or worse, the script is very much an Ellroy work.  The title refers to the Rampart Division police scandal of 1999, but other than thematically, that's very much in the background of the story.  The film concerns Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson, also star of The Messenger), a classic Ellroy protagonist:  a mix of good and bad cop--utterly dedicated, but prone to violence and heedless of the consequences of his actions.  He has a dismal personal life--his informal version of a Big Love lifestyle, having married first one sister (Cynthia Nixon) and then the other (Anne Heche), and now living with both--is falling apart.  And he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.  

Like many other Ellroy protagonists before him, Dave is the victim of a shadowy conspiracy taking place far above his head.  And as in many Ellroy novels, that conspiracy stays shadowy, complex and mostly undefined.  The idea seems to be that Dave is being made a pawn so that those in power can condemn him and distract the public from the larger Rampart scandal, but that's never confirmed or explained.  Similarly, characters turn up enigmatically--especially Robin Wright in an incomprehensible role as a woman Dave picks up one night in a bar--and their roles remain frustratingly opaque, except that they cause trouble for Dave.  The movie becomes busier and emptier as it goes along, with an inconclusive ending that resolves absolutely nothing.

It doesn't help that Moverman has come very late to the "urban thriller means jittery handheld camera" party, and the movie, powered by Bobby Bukowski's derivative digital photography, is downright annoying to watch.  (If the concept was to use that style because in 1999 it would have been state of the art, it's a stylization that doesn't work.)  Nor that the grittiness of the subject matter is constantly upstaged by the all-star cast (Look, it's Sigourney Weaver!).  

Even in these less than ideal circumstances, Moverman retains his skill with actors.  Harrelson is playing a more familiar character than the one he had in The Messenger (he's a more victimized version of Vic Mackey in The Shield), but he plays the role with all-out conviction and sly humor.  Most of the supporting actors--Weaver, Wright, Nixon,, Heche, Steve Buscemi as a weaselly DA, Ben Foster (also from The Messenger) as a homeless informant, Ice Cube as a version of Mary McDonnell's IA cop from The Closer, Ned Beatty as Dave's wired-in and possibly untrustworthy mentor, Brie Larson as Dave's bitter daughter--get some pungent dialogue from Ellroy and Moverman, and run with it.  On a scene by scene basis, the picture is often enjoyable, even if the pieces never fit together.

Rampart is a failure, but it's a quality one; Moverman aimed high and missed.  In his next try, he'd be better off developing his own vision than subordinating it to that of another creative mind, even one as talented as James Ellroy's.  This time around, he got lost in the labyrinthine streets of Ellroy's personal fictional city.

TEN YEAR, which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, is one of the few festival movies that has the feel of a potential hit.  This is because, apart from its hugely engaging cast and, to be sure, some effective writing and directing, it's really not a "film festival" movie at all, but a totally conventional example of quality commercial entertainment--which works (the crowd went wild tonight) in or out of a festival venue.

Ten Year, as its title implies, takes us to one of Hollywood's most beloved situations:  the high school reunion.  (Beautiful Girls, Romy and Michelle, Zach and Miri, Grosse Point Blank, Something Wild--the list goes on.)  Jamie Linden's script (he also makes his directing debut) all takes place on the night of the big event, and Linden is not about to reinvent the wheel (his prior scripts include those hugely innovative projects We Are Marshall and Dear John).  Linden knows the satisfactions of multiple plotlines all reaching their predestined closures within the same confined time and space, and he provides them.

So we have the overgrown child-men (Justin Long and Max Minghella) who finally have to grow up and admit some tough truths; the party girl (Lynn Collins) with something to hide; the guy (Channing Tatum) with the perfect girlfriend (Jenna Dewan-Tatum) who can't bring himself to propose to her until he sees his ex (Rosario Dawson) one more time; the guy who turns into a sloppy drunk (Chris Pratt) and has to be taken care of by his responsible, loving wife (Ari Graynor), et al.  And let's not forget the swooniest crowd-pleaser of all (I should insert a mild spoiler warning here, for those who have never seen a movie before):  the guy who wrote the hit single (Oscar Isaac) and re-meets his old high school pal (Kate Mara) at the reunion, but somehow she's never even once heard his song until he sings it that night, and can you guess who the song turns out to be about?

It's easy to be cynical about all this, and certainly Ten Year would be a better film if it dared to risk something--anything--with an unfamiliar plot twist.  But conventions work for a reason, and here they're quite well done.  There's not a weak link in the cast, which also includes Anthony Mackie, Ron Livingston, Scott Porter, Aubrey Plaza, Aaron Yoo and Brian Geraghty (standouts include Pratt and Graynor, Long, Minghella and Collins, and Isaac and Mara).  And while as a director, Linden is far from a visual stylist, he's got a fine ability to juggle half a dozen storylines in 100 minutes and have all the stories come out pleasingly. (The editor, who was probably instrumental in making this come together, is Jake Pushinsky, who's worked a lot with Dito Montiel--probably not coincidentally, so has Channing Tatum, who is a producer as well as a star of this picture, and who starred in Linden's Dear John script.  The movie business is a small, small world.)

Ten Year is a movie that gives plenty of predictable laughs and sentiment, and that's not to be underrated--damn few Hollywood movies each year pull it off.  It's the kind of picture that, if you happen to notice it on cable 10 years from now, you'll tune in just for a few minutes and end up sticking with it to the end yet again.

Derick Martini's HICK is like a Sundance movie that took the wrong indie-film exit and wound up in Toronto.  For whatever reason, Toronto's film festival tends to find itself with fewer stories of young people from small towns who come of age on the road, so Hick has a little air of distinction here.

The movie's other striking quality is the way it slides from a seemingly light tone to a surprising amount of darkness.  We meet Luli (Chloe Moretz, best known as Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass), on the eve of her 13th birthday.  It's the late 70s, and Luli lives in the kind of white trash millieu in Nebraska beloved by indie filmmakers:  her birthday presents include a gun, and her parents (mom is Juliette Lewis, as subtle as ever) are soon drunkenly screaming at each other in the parking lot.  Soon enough, both desert Luli, who sees a TV special on the barely-working set and decides she'll hitch her way to Vegas.

And so her adventures begin.  Before long, she's encountered an earnest cowboy who doesn't like people making fun of his limp (Eddie Redmayne), and a hustler (Blake Lively) who enlists Luli into her plans.  No one, however, is quite who they seem to be.  Luli finds herself exposed to far more of the adult world than she--or we--anticipated.

Martini, who previously directed Lymelife (which did premiere at Sundance and was even acquired for distribution, although it was barely released), is very cunning about the way the adult characters are gradually revealed.  For a long time, we and Luli aren't sure how much serious trouble she's in (the answer:  a lot), and that makes the third act reveals quite disturbing, although still wildly melodramatic.  (This can't be fully appreciated without seeing the movie, but it's pretty remarkable that in the Q&A after the screening, the co-screenwriter and author of the original novel, Andrea Portes, noted that many of the events in the novel and film are semi-autobiographical.)  

As in Lymelife, Martini is very good with actors (Alec Baldwin and Rory Culkin, two of the leads in Lymelife, return in small roles here).  Moretz, whose specialty in Kick-Ass and Let Me In has been overt menace, here still has strength but is able to channel it into a more age-appropriate innocence.  Redmayne is able to show colors he's never played on screen before, and Lively gives her first genuinely effective big screen performance.  

Hick isn't likely to be much more successful than Lymelife was--it's stuck in a familiar indie-film subgenre, and its quirks make it interesting but not remarkable enough to break out of that box; also, many audiences will find its subject matter distasteful.  Martini remains a filmmaker to watch, though; it can't be an accident that so many actors give notable performances in front of his camera.

It's anyone's guess why Francis Ford Coppola, at the age of 72, with some enduring cinema classics to his name, would decide to make a movie that's a cross between a David Lynch retread, an old horror cheapie, and a hallucination.  What matters is that the resulting TWIXT is utterly dreadful, the worst film this great director has ever created.

Before the Toronto screening, Coppola said that Twixt is based on a dream he'd had--always a danger sign in itself--from which he'd been woken before reaching the ending.  He's duplicated this all too literally in the film:  hero Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer) is a third-rate horror novelist determined to dream his next book, but he keeps waking up before reaching the ending.  Baltimore is in the small, menacing town of Swan Valley, flogging his latest novel, when he runs into any number of idiotic and senseless incidents.  A teenager has been killed with a stake in her heart; another (ghost? vampire?) young girl (Elle Fanning) wants to chat; there's a (witch? vampire?) motorcycle gang on the other side of the lake; the crazy sheriff (Bruce Dern) wants to collaborate on a book; and the very talkative ghost of Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin) is hanging around.  Don't expect any of it to make sense.

Coppola is all over the place here.  He's using music video gimmicks from the 1990s (oooh, black and white with just a chosen few colors in the image!), revisiting Rumble Fish, doing goofs on Apocalypse Now (Kilmer, himself approaching Brando-esque proportions, does a Colonel Kurtz bit when he has writer's block), throwing 3D into a couple of sequences.  The picture seems like a joke, but then Kilmer delivers a highly emotional speech about the death of his child in a boating accident, and one remembers that Coppola's own son died in just such an accident in 1986.  The whole movie makes you wince.

It's impossible to evaluate the acting, because since it's never clear just what Coppola has in mind, one can't tell whether the rampant over-emoting is justified or not.  (The one exception is Fanning, who remains an arresting screen presence even in this farrago.)  Mihai Malaimare Jr, who's been shooting all Coppola's recent films, keeps everything looking low-budget and cruddy--but maybe that was the intention.  Ditto the disjointed editing by Robert Schafer.

Coppola's sort-of comeback, after 10 years of inactivity, is a mystifying one.  Youth Without Youth was a mess, but at least it was a beautiful one; Tetro seemed to be finding its way to something more dramatically compelling.  Twixt, though, would be laughed off a Midnight Madness screen, much less serving as a festival Special Presentation.  Some master filmmakers--Bunuel, Bergman, Kurosawa, recently Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood--retain and even enhance their skills late in their careers. Others, like Billy Wilder, are sad remnants of their old selves.  It's beginning to look, tragically, as though Francis Coppola may be one of the latter.

The first substantial buy of the Toronto Film Festival (Shame had sold first, but for art film prices) turned out to be Salmon Fishing In the Yemen, a modestly engaging romantic comedy from Lasse Hallstrom. 

Hallstrom has made a career out of "modestly engaging," following his early distinction with My Life As a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape with a collection that includes Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, The Shipping News and Dear John. All bittersweet romances, none particularly memorable. The same goes for Salmon Fishing, which is more on the Chocolat (humorous) end of his scale.

Salmon Fishing In the Yemen, from Simon Beaufoy's screenplay (based on what is reportedly a much more politically satirical novel by Paul Torday), is about exactly that. Ewan McGregor plays Alfred Jones, a fisheries expert who is approached by Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), on behalf of here client, Yemeni sheik (Amir Waked). As the title says, he wants to find a way to import salmon to the river he's created with a dam on the Yemen. Fred thinks it's impossible, and he and Harriet rub each other the wrong way: she thinks he's an officious obstacle, and he thinks she's out of her mind. Of such, of course, are movie romances born, once inconveniences such as his wife and her boyfriend are taken care of.

McGregor and Blunt are charming together, which makes the slog to the predictable ending easier to take. And Hallstrom and Beaufoy have a (not so) secret weapon in their supporting cast: Kristin Scott Thomas as the government press secretary, hitting every arrow of dialogue with a bullseye, even the duller ones.

Salmon Fishing In the Yemen isn't exactly what we think of as a "film festival" movie--it's the kind of innocuous entertainment that turns up on cable several times a day. In the context of the bleak and the difficult that makes up many festival days, though, it can feel like a relief. Those cable schedules can feel like a Lasse Hallstrom festival of its own some days, and Salmon Fishing will fit in perfectly.

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DRIVE is a self-conscious genre movie, and those are tricky propositions.  On the one hand, you need to make your existential or other textual statement with all the artistry at your command; on the other, you still have to fulfill the demands of the genre you've chosen.  If you do it right, you have Heat; make a mistake and you've got The Driver.  Nicolas Winding Refn has for the most part made smart decisions, and the result is an exciting, moody thriller graced with an exceptional cast and some high-caliber moviemaking.

Taking a cue from The Driver, the protagonist of Drive has no given name, and is credited merely as "Driver."  (Walter Hill's picture pushed the pretention farther, with hardly any of the characters having names.)  Ryan Gosling, continuing to find a sweet spot between commercial vehicles (so to speak) and art-house cinema, plays a man with overlapping jobs:  he's a movie stunt-driver, an auto mechanic and a getaway driver for heists.  (In all 3 professions, he works with Shannon, played by Bryan Cranston.)  As a getaway man, he insists on strict rules:  he has nothing to do with the robbery itself, but provides the crooks with a window of exactly 5 minutes.  If they're in his car with the loot within that window, he guarantees they'll get where they want to go; any earlier or later, and he's gone. 

Our hero is reticent (of course), but immensely loyal, and he lets Shannon talk him into a plan to work together on a NASCAR auto, for which he'll be the driver.  This requires capital, however, which brings them into the orbit of gangster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and his partner Nino (Ron Perlman).  As one may easily imagine, no good can come of this.  Meanwhile, he's also met his neighbor down the hall, Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son Benicio (Kaden Leos).  The three become close, but then Irene's husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison, which starts the plot rolling and the characters dying.  Inevitably, things boil down to the Driver facing off against those who threaten the people he cares about. 

Refn directed the Danish Pusher trilogy, as well as the prison drama Bronson, so he's not a newcomer to the melding of thrills with character and theme.  Working from a spare script by Hossein Amini (from the novel by James Sallis), Refn works the genre conventions--the heist gone bad, the chases, the double-crosses that become triple, the killings that have to happen because a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do--with style and speed, and no compunction about mixing aesthetically composed chase sequences with sudden, bloody and brutal violence.  The gorgeous LA photography is by Newton Thomas Sigel, whose films include 3 Kings and The Usual Suspects, and the swift, lucid editing is by Mat Newman, a Refn veteran.  Also notable is the score by Cliff Martinez, a regular member of Steven Soderbergh's team. 

This side of Michael Mann, rarely do genre efforts draw this kind of cast. Gosling's streak of quality movies continues, and in what easily could have been a rote Man-With-No-Name kind of role, he brings humanity and a believably heartfelt wish to avoid the violence he wreaks.  Mulligan has perfected the heartfelt yearning she conveyed in An Education and Never Let Me Go; her part here is thin, but she fills it with emotion.  Probably the movie's biggest surprise is Albert Brooks--he did a jokey convict role in Out of Sight, but here he's utterly convincing as an aging gangster who's wearily willing to handle the dirty work himself.  Perlman, Isaac, Cranston and Christina Hendricks all contribute tasty supporting bits.

It's difficult to sell a movie like Drive, because even great reviews can drive the genre fans away, while promos that center on car chases and shoot-outs may not appeal to the art film crowd.  Gosling, although one of the fastest-rising actors around, has yet to prove that his name can open a movie on its own.  However it does at the box office, however, Drive is a superior example of having your genre and deconstructing it too.

In just her second feature film as a director (her first was 2006's Oscar-nominated Away From Her), Sarah Polley demonstrates that she's already a filmmaker with rare grace and sensuality in TAKE THIS WALTZ, which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival.  Blessed with yet another superb lead performance by Michelle Williams, Polley's film has the kind of sensitivity and artistry that gives film festivals a good name.

The story (which unlike Away With Her is a Polley original) is simple:  Margot (Williams), married for 5 years to Lou (Seth Rogen, in a subtle performance that doesn't have a trace of his usual screen persona), is feeling twinges of unfulfillment.  Although her marriage is comfortable, there's something not-quite-adult about it--they're a couple that does schtick instead of talking about their increasing issues.  Margot also dreams of writing seriously, but for now she merely composes guide pamphlets for tourist attractions. She meets a stranger on one of her business trips, Daniel (Luke Kirby), and indulges in some flirtation--which becomes more serious when she finds out Daniel lives right across the street, and she'll have contact with him almost every day.  Soon she's entertaining serious thoughts of a extramarital romance, but she's not quite sure she's ready to give up her settled life.

This is the stuff of a million novels and TV-movies, but Polley and Williams give every sequence the specificity of reality, and Polley pushes this to a sensual hyperreality with cinematographer Luc Montpelier (apart from working with Polley on Away From Her, he shot the beautiful Cairo Time); the colors pop off the screen, emphasizing the passions these characters are feeling and repressing.  Polley also uses music marvelously (the film's title is from a Leonard Cohen song, heard during a particularly memorable montage), and Matthew Davies' production design makes each routine location seem distinctive.

The cast is extraordinary.  Williams, at this point, is as entitled as anyone to be considered the leading actress of her generation, and this joins Blue Valentine and Wendy and Lucy as one of her best (and unlike in those films, here Williams gets to be funny as well as heartbreaking).  Even performing the simplest act or delivering the most ordinary dialogue, a complex of emotions seems to burn through her skin.  Kirby, mostly a TV actor until now, has powerful magnetism with her.  Joining Rogen (who, with a strong performance as well in the upcoming 50/50, is having a very good TIFF) as a piece of daring casting by Polley that works out beautifully, Sarah Silverman gives a completely convincing performance as Rogen's alcoholic sister.

Take This Waltz has its flaws.  I wish Polley had resisted making Daniel a sensitive artist who picturesquely makes his living as a rickshaw operator; the first part is hackneyed in a way the movie otherwise avoids, and the second unnecessarily calls attention to itself as a detail.  More seriously, after a pitch-perfect 90 minutes of intensified naturalism, the last section of the film goes in another direction that has lovely moments, but feels attenuated overall.  For the most part, though, the film is a superb second chapter in what is becoming an exciting directoral career.

If Arthur Schnitzler had only been a member of the WGA in 1900, when he wrote the play La Ronde, and he'd had the benefit of the format rights guild members receive today, he and his descendants would be very rich indeed.  Schnitzler's concept, a series of sequences in which, initially, Person A meets with Person B, who in the next scene encounters Person C, who then shares a scene with Person D, and so on until Person Z is with Person A, has become a archetypal structure for both literature and drama.  The newest entry to be inspired by Schnitzler's work is 360, directed by Fernando Meirelles (City of God, The Constant Gardener) from a script by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon). which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival.

Schnitzler's play used its format to make a point about interrelationships between the classes (and, since the relationships were all implicitly sexual, a darkly comic one about the spread of venereal diseases).  In the Meirelles/Morgan version, the title 360 refers not only to the degrees of a circle, but also the circular nature of the Earth; unlike Schnitzler's tale, which took place entirely in Vienna, the film begins in that city but then travels around the world, with stops in London, Paris, Bratislava, Denver, Phoenix and other locations before returning to Vienna.  The point of all this, however, is more obscure.

The connections between the stories in 360 are somewhat more tangential than in La Ronde.  a hooker in Vienna doesn't quite meet a businessman from London (Jude Law); a recovering alcoholic searching for his long-lost daughter (Anthony Hopkins) strikes up the barest friendship on an airplane with his Brazilian seatmate (Maria Flor) who's returning home after a bad romance.  The result is that one has to hunt for an overriding theme, other than chance decisions and the coincidences cited by the narration.  Is the film saying something about globalization?  Modern morality?  If its only reason for being is to note that one fluke can lead to another, that's not a very satisfying theme.

That being said, 360 is often quite enjoyable to watch.  The soundtrack alone, which includes an extraordinarily diverse set of songs, is exceptional.  Beyond that, Meirelles has assembled a very fine cast both famous (Rachel Weisz and Ben Foster, in addition to Hopkins and Law) and relatively unknown (Flor, as well as Tereza Sbova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov and Dinara Drukarova).  There's also impeccable photography by Adriano Goldman, and a remarkably lucid job of balancing multiple stories by editor Daniel Rezende (who also worked on City of God). 

A film like 360 is almost by definition uneven, since watching it is more akin to following an anthology than a typical narrative.  Some of the episodes are genuinely moving and suspenseful, while others feel like slack connective tissue.  What should make the work succeed as a whole is the uniting purpose of the enterprise.  Here that seems to be deeply buried if not lacking, and the result is a picture that never brings its circle together.