Movie Nation

Daniel Radcliffe acquits himself reasonably well in his first adult big screen role, a man haunted by “The Woman in Black.”

He plays a young lawyer, a single father and widower with enough conviction to make this spooky period piece credible, though one might wish for a little more fear in the character and in his performance when confronted by the sinister and the supernatural.

I guess once you’ve faced down Lord Voldemort, you “ain’t afraid of no ghosts.”

Arthur Kipps is a failing young barrister in the Britain of the early ’20s. He still grieves for his wife, who died in childbirth, and pays a little too much attention to the spiritualist ads in his local newspaper. That’s mhow much he longs to see her again.

But he has a young son to support, so he seizes one last chance to prove himself– a trek to the north of Britain, to the marshy east coast where he must rummage through the papers of a family whose long-abandoned mansion — Eel Marsh — is to be sold.

The residents of the dank, grey and backward little village of Crythin Gifford aren’t very welcoming. There’s no room at the inn, no smile at any door. They want him gone, and quick. And since the film’s opening scene shows three village girls hurl themselves out of a window, we know there’s tragedy there.

Only the county’s wealthiest man, Samuel Daily (Ciaran Hinds) will give Arthur the time of day. He hints at an explanation for the apparition Arthur has seen at Eel Marsh, but he dismisses it.

“Don’t go chasing shadows, Arthur.”

Naturally, that’s exactly what Arthur does. The house — on an island surrounded by the incoming tide several times a day, he is stranded there with a jumble of papers, cobwebs and candles for long stretches of time. And no thump of a rocking chair of glimpse of a wraith in black mourning dress can go uninvestigated.

There’s a lot of atmosphere, but not a lot of urgency to this James Watkins (“Eden Lake”) film. The back story may be only  sketched in, but the thoroughly chilling jolts are handled in the most hair raising ways. I love the way he uses the simplest effects — the way Arthur, holding a candle, is followed across the room through the reflection of the candle on an old doll’s glass eye, a simple look of doomed resignation on a child’s face, an unearthly hand slapped against a window. Oscar nominee Janet McTeer (“Albert Nobbs”) is a special effect herself, playing the mercurial, mad Mrs. Daily.

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Men on opposing sides of war find their shared humanity in their love of animals in “War Horse,” Steven Spielberg’s sentimental epic about a country thoroughbred who travels from the fields of Devonshire to the trenches of the Somme in World War I.

The film — based on a play that was based on Michael Morpurgo’s children’s book — is a tale told on a vast canvas, with a wide array of characters — each of whom develops a connection to “Joey,” one of the prettiest equines ever to grace the silver screen. But that crowded hodge-podge of characters fritters away the potential poignancy as we’re taken away from the story’s heart and soul — a boy and his horse.

Albert, played by newcomer Jeremy Irvine, has been in love with this horse since first he was a foal. The animal is of little use in farm country in pre-World War I Britain. He’s a racing stallion in a hardscrabble land where draft horses are all anyone wants. But his drunken, proud and war-hobbled dad (Peter Mullan) buys the colt at an auction and Albert gets to train him, to show the farm folk and snooty landlord (David Thewlis) what Joey can do with a plow. 

“You keep looking after Joey and he’ll keep looking after you,” his mom (Emily Watson) counsels.

But war is declared and Dad has to sell the horse to an Army cavalry officer to pay the rent. Horse is wrenched from boy, and vice versa. At least Captain Nicholls (Tom Hiddleston) is sympathetic.

“I’ll respect him and all the care you’ve taken with him,” the soldier promises. Think of the sale as a “lease,” he says. Joey will come back to Albert after the fighting “Over There.”

What follows after this 40 minute prologue is a magnificent and misguided cavalry charge that leads Joey on an odyssey that puts him first in German hands, then in the e care of a French teen and her grandpa, a pawn of war hauling ambulances and artillery and experiencing the horrors of No Man’s Land and the world’s first tanks.

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Aamir  Khan seems to be the one superstar of Indian film to consistently get his movies into the American export market. Ever since the cricket match during the Raj epic “Lagaan” (2001), his movies have shown up here reaching the vast Indian diaspora of North America.
But it’s hard to say if he’s choosing his subjects with more of an eye toward the West, or if these seemingly Westernized projects (“Like Stars on Earth” was one) are what sell back on the Subcontinent. But with every import, these polished, well-acted comedies and melodramas show more signs of Hollywood style storytelling.
“Talaash,” his latest, has him playing a troubled but dogged police inspector trying to get to the bottom of a freak auto accident that killed a famous Bollywood star. That takes the cop into the seedy underworld of Mumbai, meeting junkies, pimps and prostitutes, trying to wring the truth out of poor people who don’t see the police as looking out for their interests.
It doesn’t help that the cops are prone to slap around the powerless — beggars, etc. — when they want information.
Inspector Sekhawat broods over the case, and grieves for a son that drowned. He takes entirely too much interest in a glamorous hooker (Kareena Kapoor) who digs a man in a moustache. She has more than just information the inspector is interested in. His wife (Rani Mukerji) seeks solace in a medium who says she can speak to the dead child. The inspector keeps (chaste) company with a call girl.
So much of this case doesn’t add up. The dead star was in the bad part of town. He’d withdrawn a large sum of money. He didn’t have his driver or “spot boy” (assistant) with him. He had met a pimp, who is now laying low, trying to stay out of the investigation.
And he was rich and famous. What was he doing driving a Hyundai? OK, that’s more my question than one for the cops.

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“Liberal Arts” is to Josh Radnor what “The Five-Year Engagement” was to Jason Segel — a big screen extension of his small-screen “How I Met Your Mother” persona.
Radnor’s second outing as a writer/director/star has him playing an overly sensitive/overly lovelorn young professional living in nostalgia and a kind of aimless idealism.

His “Ted” is a bookish, snobby, 30something architect/college professor seeking Miss Perfect Match on TV, his Jesse in the film is a bookish, snobby 30something college admissions counselor who stumbles into Miss Perfect–She’s Entirely Too Young for You.” Quite the stretch.

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They’re young, they’re tourists and they want to go where nobody gets to go, to have an experience to brag about when they get home.
Visit Russia and Ukraine? You have GOT to sneak into long-off-limits radioactive dead zone around Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history. When they hear rustling in one of the ruins they tour with their off-the-books guide Yuri, they are utterly freaked out when a real Russian bear bolts past them.
“Anyone else have a story like this?” Paul (Jonathan Sadowski) chortles. He’s the American living in the former USSR that five friends are visiting.
No, they don’t. And since “Chernobyl Diaries” is a horror picture, you immediately wonder who, in that sextet, will make it out to tell that story.
There are weird goings on in the ruins, the abandoned cars and overgrown forests that are the features of this desolate landscape.
“Are there people here?” one of the college coeds asks.
“Ees eeempossible,” Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) declares.
Of course he’s wrong. Of course his rattletrap van, their “Mystery Machine” means of getting to the place, is sabotaged. Of course they’re stuck there, in the dark, where radioactive things go “bump” in the Chernobyl night. Of course they split up. Of course they start dying off.

Oren Peli, the guy behind “Paranormal Activity,” had a writing hand in “Chernobyl Diaries.” Thus, this standard-issue horror picture has a promising concept, at least. Pretty young tourists (Jesse McCartney, Olivia Dudley, Devin Kelly and Nathan Phillips among them) take an off-the-books trip to the forbidden zone around the worst nuclear accident in history and discover what has survived there.
The horror! The horror!

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The first thing about “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is that it’s superfluous. The original Swedish films may be subtitled, with actors few outside of Sweden had heard of before they came out. But the shock of discovering the socialist paradise’s dark side — Nazis, perverts, serial killers and libel laws that endanger good journalism — the very Swedishness of the piece, made the films of Stieg Larsson’s books riveting big-screen page-turners.
The story — about an aging industrialist who commissions a struggling journalist, who in turn asks for help from a touchy, tortured and troubled bi-sexual punk computer hack with a huge dragon tattoo running down her back — is dense and textured, lots of characters to keep track of, motives to trace, crimes to discover and an ancient missing person case that leads us into the dark world of Larsson’s creation.
David Fincher’s Hollywood remake has a great cast — Rooney Mara has been nominated for an Oscar for her turn in the title role, Daniel Craig is the gutsy journalist, Christoper Plummer is the patriarch, with Robin Wright, Stellan Skarsgard, Joely Richardson and other Hollywood character players such as Steven Berkoff filling in around the edges.
The new version has Hollywood production values — dazzling production design, amped up action beats, terrific stunt work and the rights to Enya’s “Sail Away.”
But Fincher, in doing what he has insisted is a “new” adaptation, has changed little. For most of the first two hours, you’d swear he even used some of the same locations — the look, feel and tempo of the movies are that similar. He didn’t fix the main “shortcoming” of the original film, it’s pace. This “Tattoo” is even longer.
Craig does his standard Daniel Craig (light British) accent, playing a Swede surrounded by other actors (Plummer, Wright and Mara) who do feign Swedish accents.
Those had to be the issues the more film savvy in Hollywood picked up on when leaving “Tattoo” out of the best picture and best director races. It’s simply not original enough. He had a blueprint and he followed it.
Craig plays journalist Mikael Blomqvist, ruined by an under-sourced expose of a devious, corrupt industrialist. In the original films, he faced jail time over this, which gave the story some urgency that this one lacks. Blomqvist was a condemned man in the first films. Here, not so much.
Plummer is the aging Henrik Vanger, lord of a shrinking industrial empire and patriarch of a disagreeable clan of Sweden’s uber-rich, a man who wonders if one of his own family members killed a favorite granddaughter who went missing back in the 1960s. Vanger hires Blomqvist to re-open the case and find out what happened to Harriet. His search includes interviews with family members (Geraldine James, Skarsgard, Joely Richardson), some of whom had Nazi sympathies back in the day. And they aren’t even the scariest Vangers.

And along the way, Blomqvist takes on an assistant, the alarming, disturbed young woman/hacker who did the Vanger’s investigation of Blomqvist before he was hired for this case. She lives outside the law, a punk covered in tattoos and piercings, hanging out in gay bars and stealing data by any electronic means necessary. She is a ward of the state, at the mercy of a seriously creepy probation officer (Yorick Van Wageninen from “The Way”).
I love the way Mara carries herself in this role (Noomi Rapace was unforgettable as Lisbeth Salander in the original films). Eyes looking down, an almost military cadence to her walking, she has lived most of her 24 years on the defensive. She takes any remark about her eating habits personally.
“I have a high metabolism I can’t put on weight” she snaps, in a rush, any time it comes up.
In going back tot eh books, screenwriter Steven Zaillian has given more a sexual/romantic side to the Blomqvist/Salandar relationship. Very David Fincher. Very Hollywood, too. That robs the film of some of the spiritual connection between these two mismatched personalities, the sense that each is returning a life-saving favor given by the other.
That doesn’t mean it’s not a thoroughly engrossing, entertaining film, one that deserves to be seen by the millions who missed the original Swedish trilogy. But it does tend to make this “Millennium Trilogy” more perfunctory, more reliant on Fincher (“Se7en,” “Zodiac”) to deliver big, graphic, jolting shocks of sex and violence and sexual violence. That renders this “Tattoo” more tawdry than revelatory, more a stunt than an a gritty, eye-opening thriller set in a country best known for its gorgeous blondes, Volvos and ABBA.
And best picture? Best director? It’s certainly better than some of the nominated films. But Fincher & Co. lose points every time this movie is nothing more than a slightly–just ever so slightly — inferior version of the Swedish films.

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For ten years Emma Watson put her real life on hold as played the plucky Hermione Granger in the eight films that brought J. K. Rowling’s wizardly world of Harry Potter to the screen. It made her rich and famous beyond her wildest imaginings.

But it made her live her life “in a very weird order,” she says. “Harry Potter pushed my life back.” Now 22, she finds herself “having a delayed adolescent experience,” a years-late turn at high school, for instance.

“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” has been one of her favorite novels. And being Emma Watson, one of the most photographed and adored young women in the world, she could have a hand in getting it turned into a film. No, she wouldn’t be the lead, and yes, she would have to fake her way through a “real” American high school experience. But the young Briton was game

“American culture and American high schools are like another world to me,” Watson says. “I had to do a lot of research just to get myself comfortable with an experience that Logan (Lerman, the film’s lead) and Ezra (Miller, who plays her half-brother) would have absorbed just by growing up in America. I felt very like the outsider.”

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Movie Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

In the world of spy fiction, there’s John le Carre, and legions of mere mortals, the men and women who give us “Bourne” this and “Bond” that.
And “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” le Carre’s spin on the days when Britain’s spy service was staggering from one “mole” scandal to another — almost fatally compromised for decades — is his masterwork, a subtle and somber thriller about realistic spies engaged in genuine spycraft.
The Oscar nominated film of it, by the Swedish director of “Let the Right One In,” glories in le Carre’s nuances, the intricate mental work of umasking a traitor. It revels in the long, studied pauses of its anti-hero, George Smiley, a disgraced spymaster working outside of the agency, nicknamed “The Circus,” trying to puzzle out/trip up whichever former colleague was actually working for the Soviets the whole time the rest of his team was trying to win the Cold War.
The film has intrigues, shootings, infidelities and clues — lots of clues — which we ponder, along with the poker-faced Smiley, played with Oscar-nominated perfection by Gary Oldman. It plays rather like its central metaphor — a game of chess, with Smiley matching wits with the traitor and the traitor’s control agent, the infamous and unseen Russian spymaster “Karla.”
The raging, chain-smoking, hard-drinking chief of The Circus, known only as “Control” (John Hurt at his most volcanic) has botched a sting he set up without the rest of the agency’s knowledge. He is forced out, along with his chief lieutenant, Smiley, and dies soon after.
But traces of Control’s suspicions linger — agents and gambits blown, secrets lost. So the officious member of the cabinet (Simon McBurney, perfect) commissions Smiley to sneak back in, out of retirement, and get to the bottom of it.
Smiley doesn’t assemble a “team,” so much as get a couple of fellows he trusts in his corner — chief among them, Agent Peter Guillam, given a brittle, nervous competence by Benedict Cumberbatch.

Is there a mole? Could it be the agency’s new chief, Percy (Toby Jones), or Percy’s pal Roy Bland (Ciaran Hinds), his underling Esterhase (David Dencik) or the dashing Bill Haydon (Colin Firth)? And how does the parallel story, that of a betrayed agent (Mark Strong, terrific as always) who now lays low, teaching at a boy’s school, fit in? “Tinker Tailor” hides its secrets well.
It’s the early 1970s, so Smiley resorts to old fashioned breaking and entering — stolen log books and the like — and simple memory, his and others’ — to unravel the mystery.
Oldman’s wonderfully understated performance at times seems a spot-on impersonation of Alec Guiness’s take on Smiley from the 1970s TV versions of “Tinker Tailor” and “Smiley’s People.” His measured cadences, thoughtful pauses and the way he turns every question from an old friend that he’s interrogating (he never lets on that that’s what this conversation is, an interrogation)into a further probing of that colleague’s recollections, is brilliant.
His marquee scene — chatting up the retired data analyst Connie Sachs (Kathy Burke).
Connie: It was a good time back then.
Smiley: It was a war, Connie.
Connie: A war we could be proud of.
My favorite scene is one Alfredson revisits several times over the course of the film, the annual Circus Christmas Party. I don’t recall this being in the book (the Bridget O’Connor-Peter Straughan script is up for best adapted screenplay). But it succinctly gets at Control’s drinking problem, the eggshells his subordinates walk on when he’s around, the various alliances within the Circus and George Smiley’s personal troubles. And the very notion of a bunch of weathered British Cold Warriors bursting into song — the Soviet National Anthem, yes they all know the words, in Russian — is a stitch.
It’s a pity this cerebral spy game wasn’t nominated for best picture, and that film fans accustomed to manic editing/spectacular parkour chases and epic brawls in this spy films may find it slow. But or the rest of us, it’s as close as the movies can get to a great le Carre novel — a deft and delicious brain-teaser of a movie.

MPAA Rating:R for violence, some sexuality/nudity and language
Cast: Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Mark Strong, Ciaran Hinds
Credits: Directed by Tomas Alfredson, scripted by Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan, based on the John Le Carre novel. A Focus Features release. Running time: 2:07