After Innocence
Some of the men in Jessica Sanders' After Innocence have been waiting almost as long: Nick Yarris spent 26 years in Pennsylvania jails; Calvin Willis 22 years in Louisiana. What all Sanders' subjects have in common is that they were exonerated by DNA testing—although, amazingly, even that wasn't always enough to get them freed. After Innocence doesn't live up to its title. Sanders deals only cursorily with re-entry issues, focusing mainly on wrongful convictions and the men who endured them. But the film paints a compelling portrait of a justice system ill-equipped to admit mistakes, let alone correct them. The film's most poignant moment is also its simplest: As Wilson Dedge, exonerated by DNA but kept in prison by Florida prosecutors on a technicality, awaits release, his mother smoothes the bedsheets in his room, silently praying. Mamie Till Mobley died in 2003 without seeing justice for her son; Dedge's mother narrowly escapes the same fate. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse)

The Aryan Couple
Contributing nothing to the body of Holocaust movies but a vague, rotten scent, John Daly's misbegotten thriller is too silly to be offensive. Starring Martin Landau as a Jewish industrialist offered a chance to buy his family's way out of Nazi Germany by turning over all their worldly goods, The Aryan Couple builds to a dinner party where Himmler (Danny Webb) and Eichmann (Steven Mackintosh) are the guests of honor, and the servants are two Jewish underground fighters who've convinced even their hosts that they are Aryan. If this sounds more like the stuff of To Be or Not to Be than Schindler's List, Daly plays everything howlingly straight, adopting a tone of TV-movie seriousness at odds with the movie's greasepaint melodrama. What poor Landau is doing in this mess is anybody's guess, but he gives it his all, even though it's manifestly not worth it. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

Brokeback Mountain
Ang Lee's burnished, melancholy adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's laconic tale of weather-worn sheep-tenders in the Wyoming countryside is more of a post-Western than a genuine oater, an elegy for cowboys who've run out of trail. It's John Wayne at the end of Stagecoach with no sunset to ride off into, no way to free himself from "the blessings of civilization." It's hardly the first movie to hint at what trail hands get up to on those long, cold nights, but it's the first time we've seen one cowboy flip the other over and spit into his palm. Unspoken heartbreak is Lee's stock in trade, and Brokeback milks the sentiment for all it's worth, although its placid pacing more often takes you to the verge of tears than past it. Ultimately, Brokeback Mountain isn't a Western. It's a weepie. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr; Ritz East; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Capote
It's a role so juicy any actor could drown in it: Truman Capote, the defiantly swishy, endlessly quotable author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, who in his day was the most famous writer in America. But Capote comes not to praise its subject, nor to bury him—rather, to dig him up just long enough to drag his name through the mud. Sketched in Stygian hues without wit or insight, it's a portrait of a man so hollow you can barely stand to look at him. As played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote is a smug, tone-deaf exploiter who sees the horrific murder of a Kansas family at the heart of In Cold Blood as the ideal opportunity for career advancement. If it weren't filmed in a style that might be called Mid-Autumn Oscar Grab, its criticisms might bear some weight. But its every point is so crushingly obvious that the movie's self-importance begins to seem more offensive than any sin Capote might have committed. --S.A. (Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16)

The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe
Veiled Christian allegory and not-so-veiled franchise-spinner, Andrew Adamson's big-budget C.S. Lewis adaptation starts off insufferable, then graduates to merely sufferable. Beginning inside a German bomber, Lion is at first all jagged editing and mugging cut-ins, the kind of "children's entertainment" predicated on the notion that kids have mush for brains. Coming off the Shrek franchise, Adamson directs every shot as if his people are made of pixels, pressing each image flat like a dead flower in a book. As the evil White Witch, Tilda Swinton's albino Valkyrie may doom Narnia to eternal winter, but she's a breath of fire in Lion's chilly wasteland, her imperious nastiness just short enough of camp to be truly frightening. (Liam Neeson and a voice synthesizer give Aslan a throaty burr, but his CGI fuzziness is no match for Swinton's icicle-spiked helm.) Despite advance screenings for church groups and partial financing by born-again billionaire Philip Anschutz, this version of Lion lays the New Testament symbolism on no thicker than the book, thus setting up a new generation for eventual feelings of betrayal when they realize they were tricked into reading the Bible. Unfortunately, Adamson, who said his way of dealing with the novel's subtext was "to ignore it," has added none of his own. Who could have guessed that a story about a war between fundamentalist factions could seem so irrelevant? --S.A. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

The Family Stone
Yes, it's that Christmas movie again: Throw a bunch of diametrically opposed types together in a room and wait for the holiday's warming glow to force the various polar opposites together. There must be families like this out there (they do keep cranking out films about them), but so far I've only met them in sitcoms and late-December releases. Dermot Mulroney, everyone's favorite bland runner-up pretty-boy—Michael Showalter might have winged his target had he cast Mulroney as The Baxter—brings his uptight new girlfriend home to meet the family: Berkeley stoner Luke Wilson, angry young sis (complete with NPR tote) Rachel McAdams, pregnant-again older sister Savannah Stehlin, and we-ran-out-of-sibs-before-we-ran-out-of-types kid brother Tyrone Giordano, who is deaf, gay and in an interracial relationship. Sarah Jessica Parker's over-enunciated line readings always sound like she's teaching diction to second-graders, and the image isn't helped by the taut schoolmarm look she adopts until her hair inevitably comes down. Writer/director Thomas Bezucha at least knows what he has with Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson as the parents, and allows for a few quiet moments amidst the orchestrated chaos, when glances and gestures suffice to conjure a genuine family dynamic. --Shaun Brady (AMC Orleans; Ritz 16; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

Good Night, and Good Luck.
As played by David Strathairn in Good Night, And Good Luck. , Edward R. Murrow isn't so much galvanizing as iron-clad. Most of Good Night focuses on Murrow's 1954 dogfight with red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the responsibility of journalism—or, more pointedly, journalists—to make their voices heard in a climate of fear. Murrow's See It Now turned the tables on McCarthy by presenting the senator "in his own words," a strategy Good Night echoes. In retrospect, the most important confrontation in Good Night is not the Murrow-McCarthy showdown, but the face-off between Murrow and CBS head William S. Paley (Frank Langella). Although Paley respects Murrow's work, the broadcasts sell poorly and alienate advertisers. When an uncompromising Murrow tells Paley, in essence, that the news is supposed to lose money, Paley responds, "People want to enjoy themselves. They don't want a civics lesson." The trouble with Good Night, And Good Luck. is its assumption that the two are incompatible. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
New director Mike Newell has turned J.K. Rowling's wildly popular series into a 14-Up peek at a rough year in boarding school. Typically a pedestrian filmmaker at best, Newell has made the series' best film thus far, a rich fantasy grounded in threshold-of-adulthood confrontations with sexuality and mortality. More important than the Tri-Wizard Tournament itself to our heroes is the accompanying ball, and the competition gets cutthroat when it comes time to find a date. The most obvious deletions are the series' trademark images and recurring characters. The students are coming to realize that their adulthood will not assure their infallibility. Gone are all of the gee-whiz visions of the magical world. For all of the evil that he's had to face, Harry is learning that the hardest struggle is being alone with yourself. --S.B. (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Narberth; Roxy; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview; UA 69th St.)

King Kong
At the start of Peter Jackson's King Kong, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is surviving the Depression in New York City by juggling and cartwheeling on a vaudeville stage. She meets film director Carl Denham (Jack Black) as she is trying to steal an apple. Denham is a schemer and opportunist, recently threatened with shutdown by his wary producers and in search of a new leading lady for his current project. His excursion is grandly delusional, as he tricks playwright Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody) into coming along to finish a script (and fall in love with Ann) and finagles stern Captain Englehorn (Thomas Kretschmann) into persisting until they literally crash into Skull Island. What sets the new movie apart from its predecessor is its characterization of Ann, and her relationship to Kong. Ann's scrappy nature allows her not only to scamper through jungles and over mountains, but also to see into Kong's desires, deliberations and devices. Jackson's incarnation certainly takes up the original's examination of the excesses and vagaries of show business, but it's Ann and Kong's romance that drives the film and at least begins to address complex race dynamics. At once sensational and heartrending, it's a romance that can't possibly be. --Cindy Fuchs (AMC Orleans; Bridge; Narberth; Ritz 16; UA Cheltenham; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

The Legend of Zorro
All the ingredients from 1998's Mask of Zorro are present in this belated sequel, but it's as if the mixture has sat in the sun too long: Legend is as rancid as its predecessor was sweet. Antonio Banderas returns as the Chicano swordsman, and Catherine Zeta-Jones as his (now ex-) wife Elena, along with original director Martin Campbell, but the chemistry is off from their first encounter. Campbell's affectless slow-pitch direction leaves his stars hanging out to dry, the editing so slack you can hear each line go thud. If it weren't such a pain to watch, The Legend of Zorro might stir up some inadvertent thriller—no movie with a wine-guzzling, two-fisted friar can be all bad. But its cynical, soulless attempt to exploit popular prejudices is simply appalling—and, given the shift in the political winds, ill-timed. --S.A. (UA Main St.; UA 69th St.)

Memoirs Of A Geisha
Transplanting the gloss of Chicago to between-the-wars Japan, Rob Marshall's Orientalist trifle is a sketchbook masquerading as a moving picture. Marshall's shellacked super-production fetishizes every detail of period dress and custom, but larger nuances loom, like the fact that Ziyi Zhang, like her co-stars Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh, is not, in fact, Japanese, or that all the actors are forced to speak Robin Swicord's stilted English. (Yeoh, a fluent English speaker, apparently had to unlearn her native accent to match Zhang and Gong's halting phonemes.) Memoirs' tale of intrigue in the omiya is too stern-faced to read as camp, although Gong turns in a performance of towering, chops-licking nastiness that only throws the movie's tepid tastefulness into sharp relief; there hasn't been a better "I will destroy you" since Barton Fink. Aimed squarely at the crochet-swaddled hearts of graying Academy voters, Marshall's overstuffed spectacle misfires on every level there is, especially in misusing some of the world's greatest actors. --S.A. (Narberth; Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz 16; UA Grant)

Paradise Now
Paradise Now, the second fiction feature from Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad, is on its way to becoming the most financially successful Arab-language film ever released in the United States. But the attention comes at a cost. In his previous movies, Rana's Wedding and Ford Transit, Abu-Assad intriguingly mixed fiction and documentary techniques. Paradise Now dumps the self-awareness for straightforward drama, and shifts its focus from the quotidian to the sensational: The movie's main characters are two young Palestinians who are recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. It's no surprise that disenfranchised young men can be convinced to kill for a cause. What's more important is the culture that spawns them, where photos of so-called martyrs are traded like baseball cards. Any sense of the bigger picture is lost, and with it, an opportunity. --S.A. (Bala)

Pride and Prejudice
Maybe we need another Pride and Prejudice like Jane Austen needs the royalty checks, but Joe Wright's fluid, graceful adaptation at least avoids drowning in its own redundancy. Matthew MacFayden makes a somewhat dull Darcy, and as the sharp-tongued, headstrong Elizabeth Bennet, the shallowness of Keira Knightley's gifts has never been more apparent. But their callowness somehow works in the movie's favor—rather than an anachronistic you-go girl, Elizabeth comes off as a petulant, strong-willed not-quite-woman whose independence is more a matter of instinct than principle, while Darcy's irritable mystery reads as twentysomething self-seriousness. Wright's gliding camera observes the actors rather than pinning them to a wall (although the six-minute Steadicam shot might be a bit much). Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn play the elder Bennets, with Jena Malone as the wayward Lydia, and too-pretty-for-words Rosamund Pike as the elder Jane. --S.A. (Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

The Squid and The Whale
Perhaps every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but the unhappier the Berkmans, the disintegrating foursome at the heart of The Squid and the Whale, become, the more familiar the movie seems. Squid was written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who based the movie on memories of his parents' divorce. It's the kind of film that can as easily be killed by praise as inattention; its strength is in its understatement, although Baumbach isn't afraid of the occasional big moment (at least as big as you can manage on a shoestring budget). But Baumbach gives us just enough remove to laugh at our own discomfort, to say nothing of the Berkmans'. --S.A. (Bryn Mawr; Ritz at the Bourse)

Syriana
When it comes to guns, oil and drugs—the means by which money moves in the world — you only maintain relationships as long as they're useful. Working through multiple and complex storylines, Syriana argues that such transience is never as manageable as power brokers imagine. Stephen Gaghan's film offers up a tangle of plotlines, all having to do with personal betrayal and political intrigues, but the film's central metaphor is familial, specifically father-son. Inspired by See No Evil, a 2002 memoir by former CIA operative Robert Baer, Syriana recalls 1970s political thrillers where the good man must beat his evil government employers at their own game, but Bob Barnes' (George Clooney) moral dilemma is not so easily sorted. --C.F. (Bala; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)

Walk The Line
John R. Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) was a hard-drinking, drug-abusing, soul-searching, black-wearing, June-Carter-loving man. Yet, he was persistently vulnerable and eager to impress. James Mangold's much-anticipated biopic predictably showcases high and low points, and draws direct lines between tragedies and emotional fallouts. The problem is that biopics need beginnings and endings, and this one wrestles the man's contradictions and passions into typical shape. The film focuses on the volatile relationship between Cash and the generous, God-fearing, self-judging June and paints a good-woman-behind-a-great-man portrait, such that June (played by Reese Witherspoon) appears only as he knows her, without a life of her own. June's devotion makes all the difference, in the sense of their glorious duets (several thrilling moments, with Witherspoon and Phoenix singing in earnest, haloed two-shots). June's gaze makes Johnny seem brilliant and gifted. It's a familiar story, and it makes you think that the true innovation might lie in her. --C.F. (AMC Orleans; UA Grant; UA Main St.; UA Riverview)

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