The Ghost Writer

Roman Polanski’s political thriller

Roman Polanski has been in the news lately. Sadly, most of the attention has been directed at his battle against extradition, not his latest movie, The Ghost Writer. The new film is proof that the director has lost none of his skill in visual storytelling. It’s a political thriller that, for once, is thrilling to watch...

Remember Me

Twilight in New York

Only nine years have passed, yet the summer of 2001 seems so far away when viewed across the rubble of 911 and all that followed. One is tempted, if only for a moment, to remember those days through the sunny haze of nostalgia as...

Brooklyn’s Finest

Crime, corruption and great acting

Movie dramas built from separate stories of overlapping lives are usually cut to measure and often made of flimsy material. In other words, they resemble a blueprint for a plot more than a story from real life. Brooklyn’s Finest rises above the usual level of parallel then converging plotlines. It stars Richard Gere, Don Cheadle and Ethan Hawke as NYPD cops on different beats but similarly sad trajectories...

Burton in Wonderland

Alice is Off Her Head

Tim Burton is obviously drawn to the look if not the substance of Victorian Gothic, and to protagonists relentless in their refusal (or inability) to conform. Little wonder he wanted to direct Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, a Victorian classic about a girl who flings herself down a rabbit hole into a world where the tedious logic of Western civilization is made...

‘Avatar’ vs. ‘The Hurt Locker’

Will the Oscars get it right this time?

Will wonders never cease? Or have the Oscars redressed their sometimes-dubious reputation by nominating an unheralded, gritty, independent war film of unlikely audience appeal—a film barely screened before being rushed to DVD and that grossed only $12 million? With nine nominations, The Hurt Locker has not only become the prestige favorite among reviewers...

Shutter Island

Martin Scorsese’s Chilling Thriller

The island rises like a prehistoric behemoth from the fog of Boston harbor, a rocky Alcatraz set in cold, swirling tides and accessible only by a choppy ferry ride. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is confined to that rock, a steeply pitched, wooded wilderness occupied by a fortress-like federal asylum for the criminally insane and the mysterious lighthouse...

The White Ribbon

Life and death in a German town

The White Ribbon begins with the voice of an aged narrator recalling the rural village where he worked as schoolmaster on the eve of World War I. He confesses that the story he’s about to tell might not be entirely true. Some of the details are hearsay. However...

The Wolfman

Solid acting helps wayward plot

Through a foggy forest of bare branches, over cold ground where twigs snap underfoot like broken bones, runs a man carrying a lantern. “Show yourself!” he cries into the darkness. Moments later the blow of an unseen creature fells him, fatally wounding him with its razor claws. The Wolfman gets off to a smashing start, and as it lopes toward its climax, it’s possible to see the film that someone must have...

The Last Station

Oscar-worthy depiction of Tolstoy’s final days

As the morning mist clears from the fields and the distant church bells toll, Count Tolstoy remains asleep in the Spartan room of his otherwise comfortable country house. His wife, Sofya, enters and gazes with deep concern...

From Paris With Love

John Travolta’s killing spree

The last time we saw John Travolta, he was the grinning sociopath who hijacked the subway in The Taking of Pelham 123. He continues to burnish his reputation as a cartoon-size bad man in From Paris With Love, this time as a good bad man. As the grinning...

Festival of Films in French Returns to UW-Milwaukee

Worldly conversations in cinema

By many standards, the artist (Daniel Auteuil) is successful, an acclaimed painter in Paris and man of many mistresses; by those same lights, the gardener (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) leads a narrowly circumscribed small-town life. When the artist returns to that town and hires a hand to tend the yard of the house he inherited, he recognizes the gardener as his long-lost childhood companion in mischief...

The Messenger

Woody Harrelson, Ben Foster knock on death’s door

Imagine the dryness in your mouth, the knot rising from your stomach and the stiffness of your tongue when knocking on a stranger’s door to tell them their son or daughter, husband or wife, is dead. Your starched green Army dress sends a signal. If the stranger is next of kin to someone in the service, they might already know the content of your message before you can say, “The secretary of the Army has asked me to inform...

As Oscars Approach, Lee Daniels Discusses Precious

Will Precious be this year’s Slumdog Millionaire and sweep the Academy Awards? It’s a daunting challenge indeed. However, both films came out of nowhere and were greeted with an enthusiastic response on the festival circuit. Precious won the Audience...

Edge of Darkness

Mel Gibson Crosses the Line

In the pair of emotionally contradictory images that open Mel Gibson’s Edge of Darkness, swollen corpses surfacing on a moonlit river are followed without pause by grainy home video of a little girl playing in the surf. A line is drawn between those images soon enough. The little girl...

Antichrist

Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg grapple with a fallen world

Weeks after their child fell from a window to his death on the sidewalk many floors below, the married couple returns home for the first time to their toy-strewn apartment. The wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is the thin shadow of sorrow, clutching her bottle of antidepressants in a bony Edvard Munch hand. Glancing...

Crazy Heart

Jeff Bridges dominates as outlaw country singer

The romance of being a bad-to-the-bone rambling man had long since faded into a drab routine for the ’70s-era outlaw country singer called Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges). When we first meet him in Crazy Heart, Blake is 57 and broke; he drinks whiskey like water and smokes like a dirty fireplace. Driving himself in a ’78 Silverado, he pulls into another desolate town for a bowling-alley gig he can barely finish...

Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart

Golden Globe winner Ready for the Oscars?

For years, Scott Cooper plugged away in Hollywood as an actor. Stardom eluded him. Now, he has created quite a splash as the screenwriter and director of the critically acclaimed Crazy Heart. The film chronicles Bad Blake, a down-and-out country singer/songwriter. Once a rising force, he’s become encumbered with numerous ex-wives and a serious drinking problem...

The Book of Eli

Another Road Taken

With the many problems facing the world, a strong undercurrent of apocalyptic anxiety runs through contemporary culture. The Road is the recent masterpiece of apocalypse cinema and it’s a hard trail to follow for The Book of Eli. The landscape of both movies is strikingly...

The Lovely Bones

A Child’s Stolen Life

The faces of missing children didn’t appear on milk cartons in 1973, the year of The Lovely Bones, and child molestation wasn’t a topic for tabloid television. In those days pedophilia was still the crime that dared not speak its name; it remained an anxious whisper...

Firestarter Films Moves Forward

Milwaukee film events draw attention

Having recently celebrated its first birthday, Firestarter Films is quickly gaining notoriety, and a following, for its bimonthly film festivals. Filmmakers and film lovers flock to the forum to screen independent films of any format or style, be it stop-motion animation, 3-D, documentaries or highlight reels of feature-length narratives. From its inception in November 2008...

Willem Dafoe Speaks Up

Wisconsin Actor Stars in Daybreakers

His name is synonymous with acting. A Wisconsin native, Willem Dafoe’s illustrious career has spanned over three decades on the big screen and stage. Before moving to New York in 1977, Willem built sets and acted with the avant-garde Theatre X in Milwaukee. Express Milwaukee caught up with Willem about his role in the futuristic sci-fi thriller, Daybreakers which opens in theaters on Jan. 8...

Top Films of 2009?

The year in review

Is the future of filmmaking represented by two of my favorite movies from 2009? Embodying the computer-generated epic cinema of fantastic spectacle, Avatar is a movie too big to be enjoyed on an iPhone, while (500) Days of Summer is an artfully crafted, intimately scaled story suitable for a tiny screen. Could Netflix be the future for any movie that’s not an epic...

Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Last call for Heath Ledger

Terry Gilliam’s latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is also Heath Ledger’s last. After his death during the filming, a trio of actors, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell...

Sherlock Holmes

Robert Downey’s Great Detective

With carriages thundering over the cobblestones of Victorian London’s gas-lit streets, a dark backdrop of hard-edged computer generated surfaces, Sherlock Holmes is closer, visually, to Dark Knight than The Hound of the Baskervilles. Unlikely director Guy Ritchie, with the help of Robert Downey Jr. (Holmes) and Jude Law (Dr. Watson...

It’s Complicated (Or Not?)

It's not only less complicated than writer-director Nancy Meyers would have you believe, it's fairly simple. That titular "It" is of course the romantic life of the film's heroine, Jane Adler (Meryl Streep). Ten years after her divorce, and five years past her last sexual fling, Jane faces a dilemma that rapidly becomes central to her life...