Apparently there is such a thing as "too good" when it comes to award consideration. In a year when Sandra Bullock is collecting acting awards hand over fist, Helen Mirren's gorgeously impassioned performance as Sofya Tolstoy is being all but ignored. Coming off her 2007 win for "The Queen" it seems like Mirren has found herself in the same predicament that Meryl Streep has bravely endured all these years--churning out such powerful performances with such consistency that they become expected rather than celebrated.
 
It's a shame, because "The Last Station" is a stunning showpiece for Mirren and a performance of this caliber would be a career maker for anyone else. In the film she plays the wife of Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer in his first Academy Award nominated role) in the final months of his life. After 48 years of marriage, Sofya Tolstoy finds that her husband belongs more to the people than he does to herself, and she launches a desparate campaign to cling to the love they share as she finds herself losing him (and his legacy) to the ideological movement he has created.

James McAvoy plays Valentin Bulgakov, a young secretary who one of Tolstoy's followers and collaborators has hired to keep an eye on Sofya and limit her progress. McAvoy has carved a strange niche for himself by consistently being the least interesting part of any movie he makes. In 2006, he played the everyman against whom the powerful presence of Idi Amin was balanced and reflected in "The Last King of Scotland". In "The Last Station" he fills a similar role, giving the viewer a conduit through which he/she sees the Tolstoys. But the subplots involving Valentin Bulgakov (how will he side? will he find love?) function as little more than filler. The movie is at its most interesting when Mirren and Plummer are onscreen. They are explosive, tragic, touching, and tender. This is where the film's power resides, and the result is a deeply engaging treatise on the conflict between a life of the heart and a life of the mind.

-Lucy Jones

It should come as no surprise that a fashion designer would create a visually stunning movie. It would shock no one that it that this movie would be populated with gorgeous characters in gorgeous clothes inhabiting gorgeous sets. And Tom Ford's directorial debut, 'A Single Man', certainly has all that. In spades. What may be surprising, and delightfully so, is that the film is also amazingly complex with a rich story and layered characters that stay in your mind well after the viewing experience is finished. Ford knows the power of a well cut suit (and wardrobe does play a key role throughout the film) but he also has an innate grasp of narrative and an ability to elicit stunning performances from his cast.

Set in 1962, 'A Single Man' follows a day in the life of George Falconer (Colin Firth)--the day which George has chosen to be his last. Crippled with sadness over the death of his romantic partner of 16 years, George has decided that he can no longer endure the pain. Beginning in the moments before his awakening, we follow him through what he has determined to be his final day. In the process, we experience through him the simple moments of beauty that are only appreciated in the acknowledgement of their impending absence. The film alternates between a monochromatic palette (to mirror George's depressed worldview) and deeply saturated color (to capture George's heightened awareness of the fleeting beauty around him). The effect is powerful. Otherwise unremarkable shots--a smoggy Los Angeles vista, a little girl jumping rope, a dog in a car--are tranformed into images of rapturous radiance. The result is a movie so beautiful that it's breathtaking. And one that succeeds in the most rare ability of film: to make you appreciate the world that greets you outside the theater as much as the cinematic one you just left.

-Lucy Jones

With a reputation for documenting (and sometimes defining) youth movements throughout the 20th Century, Richard Linklater hops into his cinematic time machine once again for "Me and Orson Welles". Set in 1937, the film follows a life altering week in the theretofore unremarkable existence of Richard Samuels, a fictional New York City high school student who is plucked from the street to act opposite Orson Welles in the inaugural production of his famed Mercury Theatre.

While Zac Efron capably plays the role of "Me", make no mistake about it, the real focus of the movie lies in the second half of the title. This is Orson Welles' show, and relative newcomer Christian McKay plays it with astonishing aplomb. He is charming and maddening. Brilliant and cruel. The artistic temperament that alienated so many investors (and ultimately rendered one of the 20th Century's greatest directors so thoroughly unemployable that he was relegated to champagne commercials and Magnum PI voice-overs) is on full display. Sure, McKay has the winks and nods down pat--the wide grin and the twinkling eye. But he so fully inhabits the role that you almost imagine Welles has been reincarnated for the part.

Bookending a Welles biopic with a warmhearted coming of age tale is a brilliant maneuver. Richard is the spoonful of sugar that allows the film to stay light and watchable, even when it's probing the dark terrain of the tortured artistic soul. The result is a highly entertaining nod to a bygone era which, happily, has something interesting to say along the way.

 -Lucy Jones

France's own Audrey Hepburn, Audrey Tautou, steels the screen once again in Anne Fontaine's 'Coco Before Chanel.'  Whether the story is true to the actual 'Coco,' Tautou evokes a character that the pioneering fashion mogul must have possessed.

Breaking social norms and a drive for personal success in a time where women were seen more as ornaments than admired for intelligence and whit, Tautou reminds us of the ambitious woman who single-handedly changed women's fashion.  Although the depths of Fontaine's "Coco" only run skin deep, the audience celebrates in her successes, even when it means sharing a bed with well-to-do men to get ahead.

'Coco Before Chanel' is an interesting depiction of one of Time Magazine's most influential people of the 20th century.  Although a classic surface rags to riches story, the audience seems to understand that the life of Coco Chanel (Gabrielle Bonheur) was anything but as uncomplicated and simple as her clothing.

by kiley lane

Steven Soderbergh’s film “The Informant! “ is not funny ‘ha ha,’ but it is amusing; if you find corporate greed comical.  "The Informant!" is based on the actual events pertaining to the exposure of an international price-fixing conspiracy involving agro-business giant, Archer Daniels Midland.  The end of the film either leaves you bored or disgusted by Matt Damon’s character, Mark Whitacre, who has the audacity to ask for a presidential pardon.

Damon’s performance as a slouchy, egocentric, pathological liar is deftly charming. Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns puts the audience in Whitacre’s head, and the use of voice over enables the audience to enter the disjointed thought process of Whitacre’s chaotic way of thinking, which is both confusing and entertaining, at times. 

Mark Whitacre is known as the highest-ranking corporate whistle-blower ever.  He earned over $300.000 a year, yet he decided to strap an FBI tapped wire to his chest for over two years in order to expose his employer’s price fixing scheme.   The audience is made to believe that Whitacre's desire to put his home, career and family on the line is due to his high moral standards and his objective to do the right thing, but what was his real motive?

“The Informant! “ is not Soderbergh’s best.  Yes, it is clever and Damon carries the show in a way that shocks the audience again and again, but the slow pace and bad back lighting makes the hour and 48 minutes hard to sit through.  Sticking around until the very end was only due to the anticipation of learning how the story panned out - in which the audience is left with the hard truth that people like Whitacre actually exist and that corporate price fixing probably happens more often than we think.  

by kiley lane

Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino's most recent film genre mashup, is a movie about the medium, bowing deeply to film itself.

Tarantino deftly nods to the spaghetti western, pulp, noir, the 40's Hollywood drama, and surely a number of obscure movie genres only the most discerning film connoisseur would recognize. Whether she wants to be or not, the viewer is in a game of identifying clues, and if guessed correctly she wins a density to the story and characters, with layers of history and context of the genre it's pointing to.

At times, the backdrop of Nazi occupied France seems incidental compared to how thickly overlaid the genre is, such as the first time we see the American army's Jewish special missions team, the Inglourious Basterds, in action. This team, led by Appalachian-Mountain-bred Lt. Aldo Rein (acted with a pretty darn decent accent by Brad Pitt), has been sent to spread fear through the Nazi regime by not only killing Nazi warriors, but by scalping them and leaving mutilated survivors to tell the tale. The filmic staging of their first foray is lifted right out of a 70's Western, as the rowdy posse stands around Rein, nicknamed Aldo the Apache, wide-legged, whooping and hollering over their gory work. The Basterds waiver between the identities of both cowboys and Indians, offering complexity of comparison to the scene.

Beyond genre-play, one of the biggest players in the film is film itself as it rewrites the history of end of the Third Reich, with Film as hero - to go into detail here would be to spoil the winding plot. Nothing is left unexplored as the potential power of film, from its physical makeup, to its power as entertainment and as propaganda (and the similarity between them), to the notion that cinema ultimately has the last word.

Perhaps what's most obvious in watching Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino's love and obsession for the medium; and for audiences who share the obsession, this movie is almost as much fun as it must have been to produce.

- Sarah Wylie Ammerman

Michael Mann’s film Public Enemies stars Jonny Depp as a character many of us have not seen in awhile.  Depp’s performance was serious, thoughtful, convincing.  He was John Dillinger. 

And for almost two and a half hours Depp had me glued to my seat, awaiting his next move, even though my bladder was pleading for release.

Public Enemies posses’ a perfect symbiosis:  old gangster characters, historic gangster legend and modern day marvel.  Most films today considered a “period” piece go to great lengths and expense to make the color, the exposure as well as the costumes resemble the specific time and event.   But if Mann used any color correction or old film stock, it wasn’t apparent and the bold choice to take the camera off the tripod to get a slight shaky handheld shot was bold indeed, but worked, keeping with the film’s contemporary edge.

Public Enemiesis a good story and Mann had all the right elements:  strong characters, sharp dialogue, a love story and tragedy.  It’s not the Godfather, but it’s damn good.  

by kiley lane