Dear John could be The Hurt Locker of romantic movies when Green Beret Staff Sergeant John Tyree (Channing Tatum) loses his stateside girlfriend Savannah (Amanda Seyfried) while serving his country in Iraq. The film has little feeling for military experience, or the sense of patriotic duty that John enunciates during the opening narration: “I am a coin in the United States Army. My edges have been rimmed and beveled. I have two [bullet] holes in me, so I’m no longer in perfect condition.” Read more

DO YOU KNOW how to read action movies or do you simply obey advertising hype? From Paris With Love delivers the minimal spills and thrills to those who like action movies for escapist release, yet beyond its hype, it is also politically aware filmmaking—without the sanctimoniousness of Syriana, United 93 orThe Messenger.Those films pretend to address the post-9/11 crisis while From Paris With Love gets all up in the mess, making it personal and exciting. Read more Read it in print

SURELY IT’S SOME kind of joke that Roberto Rossellini’s War Trilogy (Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero) was released on the market in a newly restored Criterion edition the same time as the British noir Red Riding Trilogy. The joke’s on us, made by the gatekeepers of contemporary film culture who roll over for trendy garbage, ready to acclaim anything they think is new. Read more

Back onscreen in Edge of Darkness, after a seven-year absence, Mel Gibson looks like hell. He’s certainly been through it—enduring the worst public vilification since Michael Jackson and O.J. Simpson. But he’s still quite a good actor and brings a believably gruff, on-edge solidity to his role as Irish Boston cop Thomas Craven, who is searching for his daughter’s killer. He’s more believable than Sean Penn’s flamboyant grieving father turn in Mystic River.Had Gibson played Jack Nicholson’s role in The Departed the film might have achieved the authenticity that was lost to Scorsese’s lowlife fantasizing. Gibson roots Craven in credible middle-aged fatigue as if to prove he’s a truer artist than his haters claim. Read more Read it in print

Only Hollywood would try to turn exploitation into inspiration.The real-life story of corporate executive John Crowley striving to save the lives of his two children afflicted with a little-known form of muscular dystrophy called Pompe disease becomes Extraordinary Measures. Despite ads that explicitly coattail the current hit film The Blind Side, this is a soft-sell, lowpressure film with far fewer images of sick kids than expected—and no villain.Yet this fairly tasteful movie manages to shift perspective from Crowley’s remarkably unflappable heroism to a contest that ultimately suggests a laboratory/boardroom Rocky. Read more

THE BAD SLEEP WELL (1960) In this extraordinary movie (showing at Film Forum Jan. 26), Kurosawa critiques corporate culture with an epic that Coppola’s The Godfather, although inspired by Kurosawa’s film, cannot match. Its revival takes down The Godfather, showing how exact, powerful and original a Kurosawa concept can be. This revenge drama tackles a corporation and public utility, tracing its chain of command to a family’s hierarchy. Read more

America may not be ready for André Téchiné’s superb new movie The Girl on the Train.To judge by the audience’s gasp at the film’s Lincoln Center world premiere last year,Téchiné’s signature interest in how race, class and sex intersect remains shocking.When screenwriter Jean-Marie Besset revealed that The Girl on the Train’s plot was based on New York’s famous 1985 Tawana Brawley affair, here transposed to contemporary France, the middle-class spectators’ anxiety suggested that the Brawley rape case’s issues were still discomforting—even 20 years after Spike Lee memorialized the case with Do The Right Thing’s wall of graffiti declaring: TAWANA TOLD THE TRUTH. Read more Read it in print

The 1994 Nas song “Life’s a Bitch”— one of the most cynical, yet most admired rap singles ever made—has finally found its film equivalent.The song appears on the soundtrack of the new British movie Fish Tank as to authenticate its grim story of a teenage white girl’s alienation. But the pathetic, council-flat life of runty 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) doesn’t take place in Nas’ 1990s. Despite the film’s pretenses of social realism, its contemporary-set story merely borrows those once-fashionable postures of working-class alienation. It’s the same sullen despondency that makes “Life’s a Bitch” so irredeemably phony. Both song and film pander to underprivileged self-pity. Read more Read it in print

The Book of Eli, yet another apocalyptic fantasy, suggests that Denzel Washington has become America’s dullest actor.This old news is confirmed by the fact that he also produced The Book of Eli, which was written and directed by twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes, the scurrilous team whose Menace II Society and American Pimp proved they shared Denzel’s taste for kitsch.These perpetual hip-hop adolescents cater to Denzel’s inner brat by providing him with a Mad Max role: Eli is a traveler, a “walker” strolling with an armlength phallic blade and bad-ass attitude (super powers to geeks like the Hughes) through a devastated, monochrome landscape full of marauders and cannibals. Read more

PORTRAYING MARRIAGE AS a complex war of egos, The Last Station dramatizes the last days of affection and hostility between Leo Tolstoy and his wife as they move from their dacha to his final home. Director Michael Hoffman’s dramatic curve concentrates on Tolstoy’s exploitative entourage (Paul Giamatti, James McAvoy) competing for the rights to his works.These historical details, verified by an end-credits montage of vintage photos that show the cast’s perfect resemblance to the real-life figures they portray, are less interesting than the domestic fireworks. Read more