Film Reviews by Serena Donadoni

Fastest Gunslingers: Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch of Appaloosa

The conflicted Irish hit men who bond In Bruges breathed new life into a tired cliché — men with guns who develop a sudden conscience — with pitch black humor in an unexpected setting: a medieval town at Christmas time. But they don’t hold a candle to Ed Harris’s Cole and Viggo Mortensen’s Hitch, the guns for hire who become the law in Appaloosa. The History of Violence co-stars make a formidable pair in this taut western. Cole and Hitch share a frank, unsentimental bond forged by mutual respect and comfort in their ascribed roles. Men of few words who mean what they say and say what they mean, with no subtext but plenty of depth, they are archetypical gunmen. Fast on the trigger, and even quicker to cover each other’s backs, these peerless shooters became exponentially better by working as a team.

More Twists Than Loot: The Bank Job

Heist films enjoyed a resurgence, but they weren’t populated by the wisecracking confidence men of Ocean’s Eleven. This was the year of the inspired amateur with an axe to grind, like the overlooked, low-level Federal Reserve employees of Mad Money, or the whip-smart, passed-over diamond exchange executive in Flawless (all women who weren’t expected to ask for anything more). The Bank Job shares their sense of desperation and defiance, and ups the ante. Based on a brazen 1971 break-in at a Lloyds Bank, where well-connected minor criminals accessed safe deposit boxes containing some very major secrets, The Bank Job soon becomes more about the exercise of power than the accumulation of wealth. This cheeky caper film is sleek but still feels as if the stakes are life or death, as deceived thieves desperately comb through Swinging London looking for its last honest man.

Fueling the Imagination: taking The Fall

Perhaps it’s residue from the Tolkien ring cycle, or blowback from the Harry Potter phenomenon, but fantasy films have become a persistent presence in theaters. One recent crop has emphasized feeding the imagination of kids as a way to foster independent thinking. When it works, on Nim’s Island, there’s a seamless blend of introspection and adventure. When it doesn’t, in The Spiderwick Chronicles, heavy-handed special effects are wielded to fix basic family conflicts. In The Fall, a precocious Romanian girl befriends a bedridden stuntman at a rehabilitation hospital during in the early days of Hollywood, where he regales her with elaborate tales of derring-do in far off lands. Made more for adults than kids, The Fall is a stunning exploration of the filmmaker as fabulist and storyteller as manipulator, with clever allusions to the way the burgeoning movie industry would affect our collective imagination.

Toughest Border Crossing: the St. Lawrence of Frozen River

This land of immigrants became acutely aware of borders after 9/11, and with that came new permutations of distrust, hostility and fear. British films about Asian immigrants like Brick Lane take the view that assimilation can only go so far, but the recent American movies Under the Same Moon and The Visitor espouse a yes we can transnational egalitarianism. By focusing on the sordid process of human trafficking and downtrodden citizens who can’t understand why anyone would come half way around the world to live like them, Frozen River offers a testy counterpoint about the limits of the American dream. This tale of a woman driving illegal immigrants across a frozen river between the U.S. and Canada in the trunk of her car so she can save her home may have seemed extreme last summer, but perfectly encapsulates our current climate.

Most Enjoyable Superhero: Hellboy!

Big Red brought back the snark — and the fun — to the superhero movie with Hellboy II: The Golden Army by not forgetting the genre’s pulp origins, just as Cloverfield revived the monster movie by taking the audience on a genuine thrill ride. Iron Man was too gadget heavy and guilt laden to really soar, and The Dark Knight will probably be analyzed by future generations as America’s embrace of our brave new dystopia. This visually astounding sequel offers wit, romance, slapstick, and a genuine sense of wonder along with the gravitas and sense of duty. As the cigar-chomping demon, Ron Perlman is steadfast and mercurial, able to juggle a human infant and his Big Baby gun with equal aplomb. Alternately sardonic, compassionate, hotheaded, tender, and frustrated, Hellboy is the destructive force who wants to save the world. Even he finds that a kick in the head.

Most Animated Animals: Kung Fu Panda and the Furious Five

The robots Wall•E and Eve are receiving the lion’s share of the animation accolades for their touching post-apocalyptic pas de deux, but animals ruled the roost: the zoo-raised creatures of Madagascar made a successful Escape 2 Africa, and the boisterous Bolt threw light on the future of 3-D animation. Despite the gimmicky concept, Po was no one-trick panda. This doughy oaf proved a formidable foe, going to battle alongside his kung fu idols after being trained by their taskmaster guru. DreamWorks made a great leap forward with this lush animated adventure, an effortless blend of comedy (verbal and physical, subtle and broad) and kick-ass action that was anything but cartoony. Set in a realistic mountain landscape and incorporating Chinese traditions and cuisine, Kung Fu Panda feels grounded but never constrained, expressing the fluid movements of every creature with joyous momentum.

Most Charismatic Narcissist: Philippe Petit of Man on Wire

The most fascinating documentary subjects are often flawed individuals who espouse moral absolutes, like French attorney Jacques Vergès (Terror’s Advocate), whose personality shifts to compliment whichever notorious client he’s representing, or Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz (Surfwise), who gave his nine kids a truly bohemian childhood but denied them the skills to be self-sufficient adults. But it’s the utterly unapologetic Philippe Petit, who performed a tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center in 1974, whose self-involvement is utterly enthralling. As his co-conspirators recall in Man on Wire, Petit was pathologically persuasive, an artist defying convention as much as gravity. They joined Philippe to share in the heady blend of anxiety and joy that his high-wire acts elicited. But it was Petit alone who was suspended in mid-air. Everyone else could only look up and try to feel his singular thrill.

Weariest Warriors: Buffalo Soldiers of Miracle at St. Anna

The allure of World War II is unmistakable, with its massive scope and theaters of battle, and recent films highlight the fierce last year before V-E Day. Valkyrie takes a thriller approach to the plot by Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler, and The Counterfeiters reveals a pernicious German plan to destabilize currency by producing fake funds in a concentration camp. The Buffalo Soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 92nd Division were fighting long before they ended up in segregated units and sent to Italy in 1944, where the retreating Germans were scorching the earth of their former Axis partner. Between scenes of carnage made all the more brutal by a sense of desperate futility, Miracle at St. Anna allows enough breathing space to ponder the repercussions of the violent breakdown of rock-solid traditions, and seeing what can be salvaged from the rubble.

Coolest Retro Spy: Agent 117 of OSS in Cairo, Nest of Spies

After his loses at the Casino Royale, James Bond receives a Quantum of Solace, and becomes even glummer. Agents 86 and 99 are revived in a reboot of Get Smart, but it had no comedic kick or action chops, paling beside the inspired lunacy of the Cold War television series. Enter Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, aka Agent 117 in the Office of Strategic Services, to save the day in the loopy, candy colored French import OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. A myopic, misogynist, xenophobic egoist, Agent 117 is a marvel of insensitivity who embodies everything wrong with arrogant tuxedo-clad superspies, embedded in a film that captures with pitch perfect precision all the style and attitude that still keeps audiences shaken and stirred at the very thought of espionage conducted over games of baccarat and chilled martinis.

Patriotism’s Slippery Slope: Stop-Loss

In Nothing Like the Holidays, sheepish parents admit to their soldier son recently arrived from Iraq that they rented Coming Home, but they could just as easily have watched films about contemporary veterans like the post-combat road trip odyssey The Lucky Ones. Unlike the Vietnam movies that came out after the fall of Saigon, these films arrive while troops are still active in Iraq and Afghanistan, and none have achieved critical or box office success. But what Stop-Loss captures so well is that almost imperceptible shift under the returning soldier’s feet, from the solid American soil he or she remembered to the unstable sand they thought they left behind over there. For Ryan Phillippe’s stalwart sergeant, facing the PTSD and suicide of peers doesn’t prepare him for the bureaucratic betrayal of stop-loss, and the shock that the government he has to fight next is his own.

© 2008, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.