When Will the Movie the Prizewinner of Defiance Ohio Show Again

EW review: Incredible 'History'

New Cronenberg moving-picture show one of year'due south best

By Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly

Gangster Ed Harris (left) threatens diner possessor Viggo Mortensen in "A History of Violence."

(Amusement Weekly) -- Anyone who has seen the attention-grabbing trailer for "A History of Violence," with its emphasis on images of Viggo Mortensen packing oestrus, might conclude that the tagline is "Aragorn: No More than Mister Nice Guy."

If fantasies of the king of Middle-world kick barrel is what it takes to bring the curious to David Cronenberg's bright movie -- without a doubt ane of the very best of the twelvemonth -- then I'm all for misdirection. Only you deserve to know that the tease echoed in the picture's edgeless title -- the B-movie come-on that here'southward an activeness picture about encarmine vengeance in a small-scale town -- is a perverse simplification of everything that makes the movie great.

In my ideal coming attraction, we'd meet little more than scenes of utmost dailiness: Mortensen as family man Tom Stall, passionately in love with his married woman, Edie (Maria Bello), happy with his kids, content in the friendly business of running a neighborhood diner in Millbrook, Indiana, and blessed with average, taken-for-granted American liberty and prosperity at its well-nigh Rockwellian.

That'due south information technology, that's the setup, with peradventure the merest hint that Tom becomes an unwilling local hero when he defends his place of business against vicious would-exist robbers who threaten his fellow citizens. For visual spice, a few glimpses of Mortensen and Bello engaged in conjugal bliss would suffice.

Come up for the calm, stay for the storm, because the movie is virtually the opposite of revenge. It'southward about the violence that surpasseth all agreement -- a cataclysm of atrocious (and sometimes funny and sometimes horrifying) consequence that unfolds with insidious intimacy and a Cronenbergian delight in the fauna squish and shock of torn bodies.

Tom's newfound media exposure ("It'due south the best matter anyone could have done to them," he naively blurts to a Television reporter about his castor with the diner bad guys) brings him to the attention of menacing out-of-towners who prowl into Millbrook in a large blackness car, none more menacing than the silky, scar-faced thug who calls himself Fogarty (Ed Harris) and claims to know Tom as a killer named Joey. "They don't similar this guy they remember you are," Edie says, trying to brand sense of the absurd alternating reality that begins to consume the entire Stall household. Who is this average Joe?

Whether violence begets violence, whether perception is reality, whether a destructive animal instinct for combat really is lodged in the peaceful center of every human being -- these are the themes that entertain Cronenberg, the Canadian original who made "Dead Ringers" and "The Fly." (Likewise up for word: Whether the gunshot blast that shatters the pocket-sized-town peace is a particularly American scenario.)

But in his nigh deceptively "mainstream" of entertainments, the filmmaker is enthralled, likewise, by the simple mechanics -- the visceral fun -- of making movies. There'southward not a scene wasted in the 97-minute unspooling, not a detour that doesn't tell, surprise, horrify, please. (At times our laughter is every bit shocking a response as our excitement, and there's plenty of cause for information technology when William Hurt makes a galloping cameo appearance.)

There's not a slack measure of music, either, in Howard Shore'south resonant score, which plays off the plainspoken aural simplicity associated with Aaron Copland to convey the melody of people who feel caged by dread, even though they're surrounded by prairie bigness.

"A History of Violence" began as a graphic novel, written by John Wagner and Vince Locke, and the well-built screenplay by Josh Olson reflects the black-and-white speed of the original medium. But much of the pic'south richness comes from the mode the filmmaker takes detours forth the route to the Stall family ending, finding expressions of psychic entropy fifty-fifty in the way the Stalls sit at the breakfast table.

A world of alter -- a autumn from innocence -- is enacted in ii contrasting sex scenes between husband and married woman, while some of the best, most powerful moments are those that occur between Tom and his teenage son, Jack (Ashton Holmes, making a terrific feature-film debut), a baffled child undergoing his own crash course in adult ethics.

"A History of Violence" is fundamentally a history of men at the throats of other men; Edie is the sole adult female in this American tragedy, and although the character is given dignity and autonomy (Bello imparts information about Edie with physical precision, never standing next to Mortensen the aforementioned way twice), it's a testosterone jungle out in that location.

That information technology's also a Garden of Eden gone poisonous -- to hell -- is something no coming attraction tin convey.

EW Form: A

'Serenity'

Reviewed by Scott Chocolate-brown

Nectar Rose and David Krumholtz in "Serenity."

Reckon I'd improve own upward hither at the trailhead: I'm a fan of "Firefly," the short-lived 2002 Fox Television series on which "Serenity" is based.

If you lot're non familiar with the crisp wit and ornery imagination of writer-creator Joss Whedon'due south rusty-nail infinite Western -- no aliens, no lightsabers, just human club, barely cohering on the retro-astro fringe -- your chances of appreciating this film are markedly lower, though certainly not nil. Probable yous'll feel a pleasant bemusement, akin to watching an fantabulous foreign motion picture with a deliberately incomplete translation.

I'm hardly exaggerating: The characters often lapse into a well-baked, quasi-frontiersy patois, peppered with Chinese slang. (Let that settle in your head -- information technology works, honest.)

The first vision of the future to contain starships and suspenders, "Serenity" (helmed past first-time feature director Whedon) embraces its infinite-Westernness with rich, oaty literalism. The planet-hopping rust saucepan of the championship is abode to a wagon train of untidy, united nations-"Star Expedition" misfits prowling the "raggedy edge" of a newly colonized solar system in search of extralegal employment.

Their leader, Capt. Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), is a chipperly bitter veteran of a vast, interplanetary civil war. (Consider him a 26th-century version of the romantically unreconstructed Reb.) He's hiding a fugitive psychic, River (Summer Glau), on the run from her Union, er, Alliance handlers. (Fans of Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" will recognize the damaged supergirl with artless tics and godlike abilities.)

River is pursued by a nameless regime operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a cocky-described monster driven by a placid, unshakable belief in the "better world" he'south helping to nurture.

The remainder of the crew -- a true ensemble on the show -- are, sadly, pencil sketches here, casualties of the 2-hour running fourth dimension. Merely each gets a "moment" that fans are free to unzip and decompress into a real graphic symbol arc.

The same goes for the story beats. "Placidity," despite its simple chase plot and elegant narrative ductwork, is unmistakably a TV flavour's worth of roller-coastering drama, most of it balanced on the capable shoulders of Fillion, a natural leading human being. Jaw set up but never strong, he gets both the Whedon wit and the Whedon grandiloquence between cheek and mucilage, and gives the whole enterprise the heft of a real saga.

Which it most certainly is -- especially for those who were already saddled upwards for the ride.

EW Course: B

'The Greatest Game Ever Played'

Reviewed by Gregory Kirschling

What accept the makers of "The Greatest Game Ever Played" washed with Shia LaBeouf, that loose, off-kilter child from "Holes" and "Constantine"?

As Francis Ouimet, the true-life twenty-yr-old "peasant" caddy who swatted against the bluish bloods at the 1913 U.South. Open, LaBeouf trods also solemnly through this puttering Disney sand trap, frowning down at an atrocious lot of golf game balls only rarely cracking a smile for u.s. folks in the gallery.

At the same time, the motion picture is so hungry for beloved that the orchestra shrieks, caps wing into the air, and the slo-mo oozes in when the lad merely forces a final play-off ... and at that place'due south still 20 minutes to go! (At the end-end, grown men weep into their giant mustaches, a soft piano reprises the orchestral thunder, and a peculiar last shot pays homage to that sports classic "Casablanca.")

Disney evokes "Miracle" and "The Rookie" in its marketing, merely this is 9-Iron Will, and the big postgame question is why managing director Bill Paxton decided to follow up his helming debut, the 2002 ax-murder drama "Frailty," with an inert family golf motion picture.

EW Grade: C-

'The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio'

Reviewed past Lisa Schwarzbaum

Is Julianne Moore to the girdle born? In "The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio," Moore comports herself once again with Eisenhower-era placidity as an ideal and idealized housewife and mother -- a sister in macerated expectations to the perfectly clean-cut, oxygen-deprived, unhappy women she played in "Far From Heaven" and "The Hours."

Stepping off the pages of a 2001 tribute memoir written by Terry "Tuff" Ryan, Moore plays Terry'due south mother, Evelyn Ryan, a existent-life domestic goddess who supported her family unit with cash and prizes won in jingle contests during the 1950s and '60s. Churchgoing mother of 10 kids and long-suffering wife of a weepy, kittenish, alcoholic husband (played by Woody Harrelson) who effectively counted every bit her 11th, this Evelyn is never less than minty fresh in rose-colored shirtwaist dresses, determined to squeeze sweet lemonade from the sour lemons of her circumstances.

Screenwriter Jane Anderson ("Normal") makes her feature directorial debut with this caramelized product, and the tone she employs -- a processed-colored perkiness that bathes every triumph, every setback, and every Ryan in the forgiving calorie-free of Simpler Times -- is very much an aesthetic pick. (I assume the surviving Ryan children, who as well make an appearance, approve of the color palette.)

Equally a consequence, though, Anderson'due south adaptation is heavy on production numbers in which jingles come to life and light on conveying whatsoever real feelings of Eisenhower-era darkness the prizewinner herself might have felt during her decades of marriage to an calumniating, drunken homo. Here, nostalgia becomes its own course of disobedience.

EW Grade: C-

'Into the Blue'

Reviewed past Owen Gleiberman

In the furthermost days of the early James Bond films, underwater action sequences had a hip tranquillity -- a lyrical zing. They were all about how fast yous could movement in a world that denied speed.

The closest that "Into the Blue" comes to that quondam '60s lyricism is to characteristic Jessica Alba, in all her tawny, rope-muscled glory, slithering through the crystal blue waves of the Bahamas.

Alba and Paul Walker are lovey-dovey Caribbean area dive bums, happy to be broke -- at least, until the appearance of Walker's buddy, a yuppie oozing frat-house smarm. (Is Scott Caan glad he gets to play these roles? It certain looks like information technology.) Out snorkeling, they detect a sunken plane full of cocaine, which leads to much underwater mayhem and above-water banality.

Walker is supposed to exist lured by the buried treasure, just the actor, wearing Brad Pitt'due south bristle cutting, is like Pitt with his sexy appetite sucked out.

EW Grade: C

'MirrorMask'

Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum

Kingdoms of light and dark, puppets and masks startling equally any at a Bauhaus brawl, CG effects and digital animation employed with avant-garde panache in a alive-action hazard, and the search for a magical object ... it's quite useless, really, to depict the remarkable cinema fantasy "MirrorMask" without losing somebody, somewhere, who says, "Ooh, no puppets for me" and therefore skips the trip.

That'southward besides bad, because this dazzling reverie of a kids-and-adults movie, an unusual collaboration between lord-of-the-cult multimedia artist Dave McKean and rex-of-the-comics Neil Gaiman ("The Sandman"), has something to astonish anybody.

What you lot do need is time and a mindset prepared to dawdle, because "MirrorMask" unspools with the rambling, intuitive digressions of a dream, especially every bit Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), a restless xv-year-old girl working for her family's circus, embarks on her hunt for the title item. I'm specially addicted of the Monkeybirds and sphinxes who brand appearances, and I'chiliad ordinarily the type to say, "Ooh, no Monkeybirds for me."

EW Grade: A-

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Source: https://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/Movies/09/30/ew.mov.history/index.html