Film Reviews
By Nathaniel Bell

Midyear Blues

With the year half-done, it's time to count our blessings and turn our weary eyes to the future, and more specifically, to the movie screens, those faithful providers of pain and pleasure.

“Sophie Scholl: The Final Days,” released way back in February, is still this year's movie to beat. Marc Rothemund's drama—a gripping and unsentimental account of the persecution and assassination of a student protestor in Nazi Germany—unfolds as a series of riveting interrogations, disclosing itself as a moral dialogue of the most urgent kind. Julia Jentsch delivers a superb performance in one of the truest portrayals of faith since “The Passion of Joan of Arc.”

“L'Enfant,” by the Dardenne brothers (Jean-Pierre and Luc), is a long, agonizing journey toward grace, and though it doesn't quite exert the same stranglehold over its audience as their previous film, “Le Fils,” it wrings a generous amount of suspense from its ingeniously simple scenario. The story of an irresponsible husband's attempt to recover his newborn son after forfeiting the child to the black market is by turns horrific, tender, and heartbreaking.

“Brick” is one of the year's true originals, a film noir filtered through the consciousness of a group of teenage outsiders. I wrote about the film earlier in the year—my estimation of it remains high as ever.

“United 93” is devastatingly good and not nearly as emotionally draining as most critics claim—if anything, this partly speculative dramatization of the events that took place on the doomed September 11 flight (more specifically, its hijacking and subsequent crash in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania) should come as a timely reminder of the stakes involved in the struggle against terrorism. Paul Greengrass applies the same terse, documentary-like style that served him so well in “Bloody Sunday,” and his screenplay mercifully abstains from the tired conventions of most Hollywood thrillers. It is an important, ennobling work.

Every year has its duds. “V for Vendetta” and “The Da Vinci Code” are two bad films made by bad filmmakers, while “Don't Come Knocking” and “A Prairie Home Companion” are two bad films made by good filmmakers. All were wasteful, distasteful, and to some extent, disgraceful.

Fall promises some respite from the summer doldrums. But then, fall always promises that.

Send me your opinions at nbell@netlistings.com