The Final Take with Parker Mott

Compromised identities: Robert Redford is on the run in "The Company You Keep".

Robert Redford’s The Company You Keep is a passably entertaining thriller, light albeit on the politics and heavy on the sentimentality. We’re introduced thus to characters who seem too likable, and emotionally approachable, based on their past dark deeds. That’s Redford: the forgiving romantic. He tries to create confrontational morality tales, but his soft, soapy liberal-mindedness holds the impact, truthfulness back. (continue reading…)

Ryan Gosling is stoic-faced in the raw-as-a-bone "The Place Beyond the Pines".

The Place Beyond the Pines is an affecting conceit, a 140-minute triptych that spans multiple generations in order to arrive at an intractable moral dilemma. Despite the gravitas, the film resonates more for its epic scale than crushing realizations and truths. It is director Derek Cianfrance’s opportunity to demonstrate his craft and ability to manufacture important themes into a film of novel proportions. He makes us of that. (continue reading…)

Jessica Chastain in "Zero Dark Thirty".

Sometimes the term suggested in times of hopeless frustration is “all you can do is laugh”. After two strenuous viewings of Zero Dark Thirty I’ve cackled hysterically at the egregious praise it has received for being “a prime example of virtuoso action filmmaking” (Christy Lemire, Associated Press”), “one of the most innovative and best made films of the past year” (Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle), and “the knockout punch of the year” (Peter Travers, Rolling Stone). (continue reading…)

Matt Damon propositions fracking to Pennsylvania townspeople in the very good "Promised Land".

Promised Land is destined to be coined that “fracking movie” the way Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is the “Scientology movie”. Those titles are kind of loose, commercial epithets for two films that, overall, use their touchy subjects more as backdrops to convincing character-driven dramas. My guess is that the writers of Promised Land – actors John Krasinski and Matt Damon – are against hydraulic fracturing but the film merely addresses that environmental concern rather than bludgeoning it in. (continue reading…)

Denzel Washington gives a great performance in "Flight".

Too many Hollywood movies today use optimism as a blanket, or cynicism as a tux (nowadays, nihilism is cool). Regardless, these films tend to highlight cliché emotion without complicating that discovery. A film like Robert Zemeckis’s Flight, starring a remarkably reserved Denzel Washington, is not in that dull category. It’s not a preordained ascension into triumph, but quite the opposite: a turbulent descent, at one moment literally, into accepting moral choice. (continue reading…)

Ben Affleck and Bryan Cranston in "Argo".

You really want to believe in Argo, Ben Affleck’s third directed film about an extraordinary undercover international government operation that harks back to Alan J. Pakula’s 1970s political thrillers like All the President’s Men and The Parallax View (with a touch of Sidney Lumet’s Network). (continue reading…)

Amy Adams and Clint Eastwood in "Trouble with the Curve".

The face of Clint Eastwood tells a better story than what’s at the heart of Trouble with the Curve, the new feel-good Hollywood dramedy where the words “cliché” and “generic” fit like a glove. Clint – that tough and wiry chap whose track record demonstrates a versatile personality of both steadfast invincibility and aged vulnerability. (continue reading…)

The animal-like Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) smirks in "The Master", the new film by PTA some critics are already calling an "American classic".

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” is about cults the way his last film the decade’s best “There Will Be Blood” was about oil. Those specific subjects are upstaged by a taut and ambiguous character study between two very different men, both in thought and demeanor, who exploit each other to achieve what they deem a higher purpose: in “Blood” it was, in many of its shades, greed. “The Master” is about greed to some extent (the greed of knowledge), but it is centred more on the desperate and borderline sociopathic measures two rivals/allies take to elude the demons of their past.

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Dreama Walker is the victim of a twisted prank call in "Compliance".

Compliance dramatizes a concept that has always fascinated me: humanity’s tragic will to conform to a perceived higher power. We can do unspeakable things all to yield to authority. Authority, be it political, institutional or judicial, is bestowed with this indisputable power. It controls and indoctrinates. Us lay people can so easily back down to the ‘system’ that we defy our own common sense. Because the authorities are sworn to protect and serve, right? (continue reading…)

Rating: R
Run Time: 115 minutes

Rachel Weisz and Jude Law are distraught lovers in "360".

360 begins with a paradox: “if there’s a fork in the road, take it.” But to where, when all the paths are unjustifiably similar? This ambiguity wafts over 360, as it tries to find a way across its characters. Cultures and human identities clash in a shrinking world. Fates and lives overlap inevitably. Perhaps unknowingly, we are in a constant dynamic of coming together. (continue reading…)