Up to Matt: Damon carries The Bourne Ultimatum, the final installment of the tremendously successful action series.

Capsules

New Releases

This Is England
Directed by Shane Meadows
B-

Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Aug. 17

Up till now filmmaker Shane Meadows (TwentyFourSeven, A Room for Romeo Brass) has merely been the lone, unassuming film spokesperson for the British Midlands. No more. From the declamatory, confident title down, This Is England belies a newfound importance, if not self-importance (at least for a good long while).

Meadows takes us back to Thatcher-era 1983, a period awash in post-Falkland Islands skirmish shame, ska, Dr. Martens and most important, skinheads. But the refreshing thing about This Is England is it doesn’t simply offer up a simple message (“Skinheads are bad!”) about the subculture. Meadows reminds us that it grew out of not racial hatred but working-class unity, and only later splintered off. This ain’t no history lesson; it’s a Proustian evocation.

Sad-eyed but rarely begging for our pathos, Thomas Turgoose plays a 12-year-old who has lost his father to the Falklands. Alienated in new surroundings, he finds himself adopted by a crew of older skinheads, led by the ingratiating, laid-back Joe Gilgun.

Meadows, like fellow countrymen Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, is a master of capturing people shooting the shit. In one of the film’s best scenes, Turgoose’s mom (Jo Hartley), horrified by her son’s newly shaven head, confronts his mates, only to leave content she’s found a reasonably polite bunch with a semblance of order.

Enter Stephen Graham, a skinhead of another, more familiar kind. I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the entrance itself, but it throws a monkey wrench into the film’s order. Newly released from prison, Graham’s charismatic, anti-immigration, National Front-approved monologues split up the gang, winning over the more insecure members—Turgoose included—under the veil of rationality and a sense of victimization.

Graham is an incredible discovery, molding a character capable of bottomless sincerity and the unmistakable sense that this guy could explode any minute. (Not since Eric Bana in Chopper has a thoroughly repugnant character been so hard to all-out despise.) That he doesn’t explode—even during a tense tete-a-tete with an old, unflinchingly frank girlfriend—keeps things interesting, until Meadows has to wrap things up.

And that’s when This Is England goes from uncommonly smart to pat, and Graham goes from a fascinating creation to just another monster who’s really crying on the inside. A real shame.

Death at a Funeral
Directed by Frank Oz
C-

Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., Aug. 17

The opening credits of the imitation Brit farce Death at a Funeral are an uncanny indicator of what’s in store. Along a giant map, a cartoon hearse slowly drives toward its destination, only to constantly make mistakes, backpedal, three-point turn, etc.

It’s a reasonably cute idea, but one drawn out way beyond its breaking point, and not quite as well as one would hope.

At least the movie’s consistent.

Comically unable to fill Colin Firth’s mordant shoes in the Keira Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice, Matthew Macfadyen lords over an ensemble cast of mourners at his father’s funeral. More important are the arrival of the two major plot complications. The first: Alan Tudyk unwittingly imbibes some high-test recreational pharmaceuticals procured from aspiring chemist/druggie Kris Marshall and loses it. The second: Peter Dinklage, seen last week as the baddie in Underdog, takes the far more dignified role as a gay dwarf out to blackmail the family with saucy pictures of him and the deceased.

There’s also a sweatily anxious nebbish (Andy Nyman), a rotten, wheelchaired old-timer with bowel complications (Peter Vaughn) and a funeral cruiser played by Ewen Bremner. (I guess that’s the joke.) But Death at a Funeral is really about only those two ideas—drugs and gay blackmail—at which the film pounds wearily away while lurching feebly toward the 90-minute mark, often fueled on nothing more than British accents. There’s a pretty good payoff to all this, but it’s like an oasis 100 yards away from where you just collapsed.

Save Richard Lester, Yank filmmakers have been unable to replicate the pace, rhythm and cadences of great British comedy. Did post-Stepford-Wives-remake Frank Oz really think he was the exception? Once upon a time, Oz was able to make the leap from puppeteer and ace voice actor to director of carbon-based lifeforms, or at least a nifty amalgam, like Little Shop of Horrors.

But as with Rob Reiner (whose last film Rumor Has It is similarly devoid of life), the magical substance, mojo or pact with Satan has eroded, leaving a stale, tired technician who’s not so much deadpan as dull. Even an early close-up of Macfadyen sighing sadly, held a couple beats too long, manages to bore. It’s no spoiler to reveal who really dies at the funeral: the director.

Molière follows a recognizable formula: Take a famous dead artist. Imagine his most well-known works were not original creations but were instead cribbed from his life. Make a fictional biography of the artist including all these events, cobbled together by an implausible plot.

For a lover of French theater, this film is full of entertaining tidbits. Molière (Romain Duris) dresses up as a priest, as if he were the hypocrite Tartuffe, while M. Jourdain (Fabrice Luchini), straight from “The Bourgeois Nobleman,” bumbles through his lessons in music, dancing and fencing. The great pleasure this film offers is the delighted frisson of recognition.

The danger of this form is that an audience member unfamiliar with Molière, the French playwright and actor who transformed comedic theater in the 17th century, will be bored. This viewer will still laugh out loud at some of the ridiculous hijinks the characters get into, but also will be left with the nagging sense of not being in on the joke. The ludicrous plot was clearly created to string together recognizable scenes from Molière’s plays, and like too many other comedies that exist to showcase brief comedy sketches, Molière doesn’t hold together well as a movie.

Some of the antics are incredibly funny, whether you adore “Le Misanthrope” or think it sounds suspiciously like homework. A scene of Molière and M. Jourdain acting like horses is a brilliant example of both physical acting and physical comedy, and might be worth the price of admission all by itself.

Ultimately, however, the movie is one long in-joke— great if you’re in, but puzzling if you’re out.

Not Reviewed

The Invasion
Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig star in another adaptation of the Jack Finney novel The Body Snatchers, in which the two must stop an invading alien lifeform that attacks people while they sleep. (Opens Fri., Aug. 17.)

The Last Legion
The story of 12-year-old emperor Romulus Augustus (Thomas Sangster), who travels to Britannia to gather supporters in an attempt to stymie the fall of Rome. (Opens Fri., Aug. 17.)

Rocket Science
A witty comedy about a stuttering boy who joins his high school debate team. From Jeffrey Blitz, the director of the documentary Spellbound. (Opens Fri., Aug. 17.)

Arctic Tale
Under the National Geographic umbrella, the husband-and-wife team of Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson spent more than a decade following wildlife in the Arctic. From their research they created the fable of polar cub Nanu and walrus pup Seela, following them from their own births to the births of their babies. Queen Latifah narrates the kid-friendly tale. It’s one thing to hear global warming is killing walruses and polar bears. It’s another to meet Seela and Nanu, and then watch them and their parents abandon the ancient rituals they’ve relied on for years in order to survive. B+ (Brook Midgley)

Becoming Jane
Anne Hathaway plays a young Jane Austen in the story of the writer’s purported real-life romance with a charming law student (James McAvoy). (Not reviewed.)

The Bourne Ultimatum
Director Paul Greengrass is back for The Bourne Ultimatum, a large chunk of which takes place in between The Bourne Supremacy’s despairing Moscow climax and that feel-good studio-mandated N.Y.C. epilogue that never felt quite right. Having lost the one person he cared about, and still tormented by memories of murder, Jason’s heading home to confront the men who made him what he is. This is whip-smart genre filmmaking with a seething political undercurrent keyed directly into the here and now. The thrill lies in watching Jason strategize and outwit his would-be captors, improvising his way out of impossible situations with a Boy Scout’s resourcefulness and those lightning-fast moves. The Bourne Ultimatum isn’t just the best movie of this trilogy—it’s one of the best films of the year. A (S.B.)

Bratz
Four best friends combat high school hierarchy in a movie based on the popular line of fashion dolls. (Not reviewed.)

For Rod‰s sake: Andy Samberg prepares to jump buses in order to beat up his stepfather in Hot.

Broken English
Broken English opens up looking like it’s going to be a light, bubbly New York rom-com, with Parker Posey as a thirtysomething who’s the last of her friends (and seemingly humankind) to pair off in the legal sense. Except Posey’s out for even fewer laughs than Jack Nicholson’s effectively drained turn in About Schmidt. Posey’s Nora Wilder, who’s stuck in a dead-end hotel job, is seriously depressed and lonely, and the actress reveals the very real insecurities under the Parker Posey we love and maybe see too much of. Director Zoe Cassavetes is right along with her star, keeping things straight-faced and subtly funny. Alas, the film slides ever so slightly off-track starting with the arrival of her destined-to-be—a Frenchman played by Time to Leave’s Melvil Poupaud, who sadly can’t temper his rather blinding and ill-applied sense of self-regard. B- (M.P.)

Daddy Day Camp
Cuba Gooding Jr. is no Eddie Murphy. But could Murphy even help? (Not reviewed.)

El Cantante
Gigli is the obvious parallel to El Cantante, starring Marc Anthony as salsa king Hector Lavoe and Jennifer Lopez as his long-suffering wife Puchi. But El Cantante isn’t Gigli. In fact, it’s not bad at all. Anthony’s covers of Lavoe’s songs are top quality and exciting. Lopez and Anthony make the relationship between Puchi and Lavoe surprisingly real, given that the tale of the self-destructive star and his saintly/enabling/harpy wife has been told a thousand times. B+ (Emily Guendelsberger)

Goya’s Ghosts
This unwieldy, rocky ride takes on both the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars. Perched perilously on the edge of camp, Goya’s Ghosts is a heedlessly overwrought melodrama boasting some of the most cheerfully insane casting blunders of recent years. The film’s underlying concerns couldn’t be more admirable. It’s all about the interchangeable corruption of hard-line ideologues, and the responsibility of the artist to speak truth to power. Too bad it also happens to be plotted like a trashy romance novel, and the endless barrage of can-you-top-this twists and some overscaled performances make it unintentionally hilarious. C (S.B.)

Gypsy Caravan
Setting out to dismantle one of the more enduring cultural stereotypes—that of Gypsies as a nomadic race who’ll steal your belongings the moment you blink—Jasmine Dellal’s film attacks by way of example, tagging along with the titular concert tour, which shlepped across the country back in 2001. Dellal’s doc is part bio, part music performance and quite a bit infomercial for an infectious brand of niche music. Along the way, Dellal and subjects inform us of the prejudices Gypsies have faced for centuries. But Dellal understands that nothing expresses Gypsy life better than their music. B (M.P.)

Hairspray
If you can stomach two hours of John Travolta in drag, then by all means. (Not reviewed.)

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
The most exciting thing about David Yates’ Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is that, four sequels into this saga, it finally feels like we’re watching a bona fide, honest-to-God movie. Slashing J.K. Rowling’s almost 900-page opus down to a relatively trim 138 minutes, screenwriter Michael Goldenberg (new to the series; the previous pictures were penned by Steve Kloves) has shed countless subplots and fan favorites, at long last reconceiving Harry Potter in purely cinematic terms. It’s a tight, thematically unified piece of work, and the moral of the story is: Adolescence sucks. B+ (S.B.)

Hot Rod
Motorcycle stuntman Rod Kimble (Andy Samberg) plans to jump 15 buses to raise money for his asshole stepfather’s heart operation. He plans to fight his stepdad once he regains his health. (Not reviewed.)

I Know Who Killed Me
Lindsay Lohan plays a stripper who may or may not have been tortured by a psychopath in this twist-laden thriller. Also starring Neal McDonough and Julia Ormond. (Not reviewed.)

I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
Sandler and The King of Queens’ Kevin James star as macho, uber-straight Brooklyn firefighters. When a bureaucratic snafu leaves widower James unable to reassign his insurance benefits to his children, the film bends over backward trying to convince us that the only logical choice is for these best friends to shack up together and fake a domestic partnership. Cue the skeeved-out snickers, as our manly men find themselves playing gay in a whole new world, one populated exclusively by mincing, flamboyant queenie stereotypes that were already stale back in the disco era. The flat visuals, slack pacing and mawkish sentimentality mark this as a Happy Madison production through and through. This movie is trying to tell you that gays are people too. Sure they’re icky, embarrassing people, but you should still be nice to them. D+ (S.B.)

Interview
War correspondent Pierre Peters (Steve Buscemi) is disgusted with his latest assignment: pounding out a puff piece about a tabloid starlet named Katya (Sienna Miller), famous not for her undistinguished acting career, but rather for the men she’s slept with. Stretching the bounds of credibility, there’s a fender bender, a mild concussion, and suddenly Pierre’s hanging out in Katya’s SoHo loft, where the booze, drugs and confessions all start pouring out in one of those stagy two-character showdowns that tend to feel more like acting school exercises than an actual movie. Interview is Buscemi’s remake of a 2003 film by the murdered Dutch director Theo van Gogh. But Buscemi is woefully miscast, and eventually the artifice of the enterprise becomes too much to bear. C (S.B.)

Labyrinth
Seemingly released in anticipation of director Frank Oz’s breathtakingly limp Death at a Funeral, this unholy union of Jim Henson, George Lucas, Terry Jones and David Bowie finds the singer as the “Goblin King,” a ruler of puppets who tries to woo 15-year-old Jennifer Connelly by kidnapping her baby brother and forcing her to trawl through a well-stocked maze. (Not reviewed.)

My Best Friend
A light French comedy about a man who convinces a cab driver to teach him how to make friends, and to pose as his best friend in order to win a bet. (Not reviewed.)

No End in Sight
Charles Ferguson’s astonishing No End in Sight has arrived just in time to show the agitprop crowd exactly how to open a productive conversation. With a marked absence of partisan editorializing and nary a hint of snark, this no-nonsense, just-the-facts-ma’am chronicle of our ill-fated Iraq occupation turns into a chilly autopsy of what might be the biggest foreign policy clusterfuck of our lifetimes. It’s all talking heads, facts, dates, timelines, eyewitness accounts and hard evidence—and it’s absolutely riveting. This is a film every American needs to see. A (S.B.)

No Reservations
Catherine Zeta-Jones plays an uptight master chef challenged by the laidback likes of Aaron Eckhart. She’s also just taken in her young niece (Abigail Breslin), who along with Eckhart teaches her to loosen up. (Not reviewed.)

Rush Hour 3
On the heels of Brett Ratner’s billion-dollar-director day, declared so by a Variety ad celebrating the cumulative gross of his seven feature films, the Hollywood wunderkind has this to say: “It took 20 years to build a pyramid, 14 years to build Mount Rushmore, 13 years to lose my virginity and six years to get Chris Tucker to make Rush Hour 3.” Let’s hope it was all worth it. (Not reviewed.)

Sicko
Anyone who’s been to an emergency room lately will loudly concur that the U.S. healthcare system is pretty much fucked. This should’ve been the perfect subject for Michael Moore’s peculiar brand of man-on-the-street muckracking. Instead Sicko turns out to be the same 30-minute movie repeated four times in a row. Moore sat down with dozens of Americans and asked them to tell their Kafkaesque tragedies of denied care, bureaucratic red tape and crippling co-pays with catastrophic consequences. It’s all seriously scary stuff, especially once you realize he’s sticking with the lucky folks who actually have health insurance, instead of the millions who don’t. Moore’s trying to make a case for socialized medicine, but his methodology is so crude, simplistic and redundant that you’ll walk out feeling like you know even less about the subject than when you walked in. C- (S.B.)

The Simpsons Movie
The best you can hope for is a couple of half-decent late-period episodes laid out over 87 minutes that never make you feel like your youth is being anally violated. Which, yippee, is exactly what you get. C+ (M.P.)

Stardust
Tristan (Charlie Cox)—the bastard offspring of a princess held captive by an evil witch—ventures into a magical kingdom to find a falling star who turns out to be hot blond Claire Danes. Evil 300-year-old witch Michelle Pfeiffer wants to cut the star’s heart out so she can live forever. Then there’s a shitload of amusingly fratricidal princes who need to get ahold of the ruby the star’s wearing before they can become king. Cue tons of black magic, snogging and sword fighting. Peter O’Toole, Ricky Gervais and Robert De Niro kick scene-stealing ass as, respectively, a dying king, a venal merchant and a closeted gay pirate captain. And a swashbuckling great time is had by all. B (Steven Wells)

Sunshine
Set a scant 50 years in the future, Sunshine follows the rather cheekily named spaceship Icarus II during what sounds like a suicide mission aimed directly at the sun. It seems our star is faltering, and it’s up to our selfless heroes to ride a gigantic multimegaton nuclear bomb straight into the sucker to give it a little jump-start. Sunshine’s first hour is mesmerizing—and one might assume a crippled spaceship short on oxygen, loaded with fissile material and headed into the sun to save planet Earth might provide enough drama for a two-hour feature. Apparently not, as Sunshine eventually devolves into a dopey slasher flick, complete with a mad, stark-naked killer running between decks. C+ (S.B.)

Talk to Me
Broad as a barn door but shamelessly entertaining, Kasi Lemmons’ loud populist biopic chronicles the tumultuous career of legendary D.C. DJ Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene Jr., a straight-shooting, shit-talking streetwise hustler played to the hilt by the great Don Cheadle. Heavily indebted to everything from Good Morning, Vietnam to Private Parts, screenwriters Michael Genet and Rick Famuyiwa paint their subject in gigantic folk-hero brushstrokes, structuring the saga around Petey’s unlikely friendship with his uptight Johnny Carson-worshipping producer/manager Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor). The film serves as a rebuke to our iPod-happy, private-playlist-addicted pop culture, saluting that quickly eroding community of radio, and remembering the way we used to share our sadness over the airwaves together. One nation, under a groove. B (S.B.)

The Ten
David Wain and Ken Marino—the Wet Hot American Summer wing of The State spill-over—unleash loopy, star-studded shorts on each of the Ten Commandments. (Not reviewed.)

Underdog
Have no fear: After gaining superpowers and the ability to speak from a lab experiment gone wrong, the caped beagle (voiced by Jason Lee) swoops in to save Capitol City from mad scientist Simon Barsinister (Peter Dinklage) and his henchmen. (Not reviewed.)

Who’s Your Caddy?
A rap mogul (Big Boi) and his crew take on the president of an elite Southern country club that doesn’t want them for members. (Not reviewed.)