Review: "The Front Runner"

“The Front Runner” is an unflattering portrait of American politics, but even more so of the media.

Based on a book by political journalist Matt Bai, who also co-wrote this screenplay, it examines the moment when tabloid and mainstream news intersected, merged and never really looked back. This was Gary Hart’s 1987 campaign for the presidency, when the U.S. senator from Colorado was seen as the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination, only to have it all unwind in less than month when his serial philandering was reported.

For decades, Washington politicians held the journalists who covered them to a gentlemen’s agreement: look the other way when young ladies are seen going in and out of our doors, and we will give the access you need to do your jobs. It was a nearly all-male environment, both in the corridors of power and the newsrooms charged with checking them -- so the Faustian bargain was accepted.

Consider that just two years before Hart’s implosion, Teddy Kennedy was witnessed assaulting a waitress along with his protégé, Chris Dodd. It went unreported for five years, and only then in a chuckling passage in a men’s magazine.

That was the mentality held by Hart, a wonky and charismatic politician played by Hugh Jackman. Hart is a man of big ideas and enthusiasm for the future who was laid low by clinging to the unsavory practices of the past. He is annoyed, then outraged, that his philandering is not swept under the rug as it always has been.

“This is beneath you,” he seethes at a young Washington Post reporter (Mamoudou Athie) who dares bring up rumors of his affairs. “Follow me around, put a tail on me. You'll be very bored.”

This line has entered the lore of politics, but like a lot of legends it’s mostly fiction. Hart did not challenge journalists to follow him and then openly dally with bimbos. Reporters from the Miami Herald, acting on a tip from a friend of one of Hart’s conquests, staked out his D.C. townhouse and witnessed model/pharmaceutical saleswoman Donna Rice (Sara Paxton) going in and out. They only heard about the “follow me” line after the fact.

(It should also be noted that the Herald reporters, played by Steve Zissis and Bill Burr, did not “hide behind bushes” as Hart contended, which also became part of the erroneous mythology.)

Directed by Jason Reitman, who co-wrote the script with Bai and Jay Carson, “The Front Runner” is an ambitious, contemplative movie that asks hard questions without offering easy answers.

Was it unseemly for reporters to lurk around during Hart’s downtime to see who he dallied with? Should they have looked the other way, as had been practice? Was it fair for Hart’s talents and ambition to be the price our nation paid for demanding more of our politicians?

One female journalist gives a poignant speech pointing out that Hart, for all his blessings, was still just another man willing to employ his power to use and dispose of women who cater to his whims. There’s also a nice sequence where one of Hart’s campaign workers (Molly Ephraim) is charged with “handling” Rice as the story explodes, knowing she is about to be fed to the wolves.

The film reminded me a lot of early Robert Altman movies, with large casts of characters moving in and out of the frame as the camera slides past, their conversations overlapping and receding. It lends a sense of documentary-like authenticity.

There’s too many supporting actors to mention, although Vera Farmiga and J. K. Simmons stand out as, respectively, Hart’s wife, Lee, who is willing to overlook his dalliances until they become an embarrassment her, and the campaign manager who has spent years building a political machine only to watch it turn to ash virtually overnight.

Thirty years later, Hart’s fall seems almost quaint now in this day of presidential porn star mistresses, handsy politicians of all stripes and a media that has grown both quantifiably smaller and more meager in its ambitions.

Making do with the errors of the past is bad, but sometimes in reaching for something better we degrade ourselves. “The Front Runner” is the cautionary tale of our collective rise and fall.

Review: "Boundaries"

Just a short review today; the studio wasn't able to get me a screener until late Thursday afternoon.

I was a bit bored and bewildered by "Boundaries." It features two world-class thespians in Vera Farmiga and Christopher Plummer, playing a daughter and father at cross ends while trying to reconnect during a road trip. It features lots of talking but not much substantive sharing. Characters do things because that's where writer/director Shana Feste wanted a scene to go, not because that's how it would have organically led there.

Farmiga plays Laura, a harried and hectored mother to troublesome teen son Henry (Lewis MacDougall), an ostracized boy who has a penchant for drawing adults in the nude in sexual and unflattering ways. Laura's jerk boyfriend, like most male authority figures, has his male parts, uh, deemphasized.

Her dad is Jack (Plummer), a rapscallion who, at 85, is being kicked out of his retirement community for repeatedly breaking the rules. He was absent during most of Laura's childhood, and they only seem to hook up when someone needs something. Circumstances align that they each have a desperate need: Laura needs money to pay for private school to help Henry with his emotional problems, and Jack needs a ride to Los Angeles.

Jack says he can't fly because of a blood clot in his leg, but Jack says lots of things. Laura has learned not to invest a lot of hope for the truth.

So off they go, driving from Seattle to Los Angeles in Jack's vintage Rolls Royce, the trio of humans along with a few of Laura's collection of castoff dogs. We're not surprised when they pick up more along the way. That's who Laura is: she protects the weak because that's how she's felt herself much of her life.

Things go from there. It turns out Jack got his money from dealing pot, and the trip is largely an excuse to drop off product along the way. Most of customers are old friends, like Stanley, a hippie who never really left the commune. He's played by Christopher Lloyd -- the other one; or rather, I'm the other one -- who gets a hot tub nude scene a la Kathy Bates in "About Schmidt."

(Unlike Farmiga in "Up in the Air," I'm confident my namesake did not use stuntbutt.)

One inevitable stop is to see Laura's ex (Bobby Cavanale), who's sort of a junior version of Jack; he's just a little more honest with himself about his failings.

I should point out that this is one of those movies that stretches out a road trip that should take one long drive into about a week. By my guess, they actually only get about four good hours on the road per day.

"Boundaries" is one of those movies where if people ask you, "What was it about?", you really have no good answer. I was willing to cut this film a lot of slack just because I like the cast so much. But it fumbles at trying to manipulate our emotions, leaving us with a road trip picture that doesn't really go anywhere.

Review: "The Commuter"

Just a few quick thoughts; Andrew Carr is handling the main review over at The Film Yap, so please head there to check it out.

On the surface, "The Commuter" is a standard issue enclosed-space action/thriller in the vein of "Die Hard," "Speed" and countless imitators. Using the nomenclature that was popular awhile back, this movie would constitute the "Die Hard on a Train" iteration.

What makes it more interesting is the subtext beneath the fisticuffs and nail-biter sequences. The characters talk constantly about "doing the right thing" and how it rarely benefits the do-gooder. The hero is a classic everyman who wanders into a moral quandary through a momentary temptation, and has to spend the rest of the movie climbing out.

The movie has a sense of glum resignation tempered by notions about the bedrock decency of the masses. But their default mode is to expect disappointment.

It's a totem for our times: the rich, the powerful, the corrupt conspire to coerce regular folks into doing their bidding, who usually must go along. And they would've gotten away with it this time, too, if it weren't for this meddling oldster.

Liam Neeson returns for another variation on his Kick-Ass Geezer routine, which has been his bread-and-butter for a decade now. Reportedly Neeson himself has grown tired of such roles and has vowed "The Commuter" will be the last of its ilk.

All I'll say he's still an engaging, energetic presence and I'd personally be happy to keep watching him do this sort of thing until he needs a walker, provided he mixes it up with some dramatic or romantic roles.

The set-up is simple: Michael MacCauley is an Irish-born ex-cop turned insurance salesman. He and his wife (Elizabeth McGovern) live hand-to-mouth and are trying to figure out how to pay for their son's college education.

(Or so they say: their huge, luxurious house  in the New York City exurbs and BMW crossover would suggest otherwise. Hollywood continues to flail at depicting middle-income families.)

He suddenly gets laid off, seemingly for no reason, and Michael knows what that means for a 60-year-old in a competitive job market. Interestingly, Michael explicitly mentions his age several times in the film; usually mainstream movies are much more circumspect about the age of their characters, especially older ones.

After meeting his cop ex-partner (Patrick Wilson) to drown his sorrow in a few beers and bumping into an old precinct rival (Sam Neill) who's recently made captain, Michael boards his normal commuter train to Tarrytown. He's confronted by a mysterious woman (Vera Farmiga) who, under the ruse of a hypothetical social experiment, offers Michael $100,000 in cash if he can identify a person onboard the train who "doesn't belong there."

That's it. The only proviso is that he doesn't know what will happen to the person, known only by the pseudonym of Prim, but we can probably guess it won't be anything good.

Things go from there with the expected twists and surprises. Michael breaks the rules set forth, and bad things happen. People on board the train who would seem to be allies turn out to be in cahoots with the evildoers, others who seem strange or threatening are actually something else, and so on. I'm not giving anything away in saying that this is the sort of movie where the hero comes to the realization that he's not just a pawn, but the patsy.

The background players are a nice mix of personalities, from the haughty stockbroker to the nervous goth teenager. The cast includes Jonathan Banks, Killian Scott, Shazad Latif, Andy Nyman, Clara Lago, Rolland Møller, Florence Pugh, Ella-Rae Smith and Colin McFarlane.

Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, who made the effective seaborne thriller "The Shallows," from a script by Byron Willinger, Philip de Blasi and Ryan Engle, "The Commuter" does all the things we expect, and a few things we don't.

Review: "The Conjuring 2"

In the real life 1970s, Lorraine and Ed Warren were a dowdy, middle-aged couple with double chins and dreams of being immortalized on film for their paranormal investigations, which they claim ran over 10,000 cases. They finally got their wish in 2013 with “The Conjuring,” a huge horror hit … which could mean there are at least 9,999 sequels to come.

Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson return as the Warrens, and they’re a nice break from the kooky sorts who usually inhabit possession movies. They’re pretty normal people of Christian faith who happen to work – often on behalf of the Catholic Church – to sniff out if reports of unusual activities are hoaxes or not.

Wilson plays Ed as a pure-hearted square, the sort of guy who fixes faucets at the houses he’s exorcising and imitates Elvis on the guitar just to calm some very scared kids. He’s kind of stiff and diffident, but there’s no mistaking his good intentions.

Lorraine is the talent, having the power to sense evil forces and communicate with wayward spirits. Despite her supernatural abilities, she’s the more grounded of the two.

After having a particularly rough outing in the 1976 Amityville case, the Warrens are taking a break from active investigations. It seems the spook followed them home, taking the form of Marilyn Manson in a nun’s habit. Well, not actually Manson, but a dead ringer. Then the Enfield case breaks near London, and they’re back on the hunt.

It seems the spirit of a nasty old man named Bill Wilkins (Bob Adrian) is reluctant to leave the shabby row house he once occupied. Peggy Hodgson (Frances O’Connor) and her four kids live there now, and soon start hearing the old thump-thump in the night – which soon turns into more terrifying incidents.

After initially going after young Billy (Benjamin Haigh), a shy lad with a stutter, the spirit focuses its intentions on Janet (Madison Wolfe), age 11. Even though we’ve seen it a hundred times, it’s still creepy as all get out when a little girl speaks with a ghost’s croaking moan. Then comes flying furniture, apparitions, possessed toys, etc.

Some local experts – Franka Potente plays Anita Gregory – have already dismissed the case as ventriloquism and clever tricks, though Maurice Grosse (Simon McBurney) is a kindly scientist with a receptive ear. The Warrens come in late in the game, just as the Wilkins spirit kicks things into high gear.

The movie takes a while to get going – it could easily stand to be 20 minutes shorter – but director James Wan, who co-wrote the script with four others, is adept at stirring the pot of anxiety. He’ll build the tension for a long moment, then have something jump out at the audience from somewhere we didn’t expect.

As horror sequels go, “The Conjuring” scares up enough to entertain us.

Video review: "The Judge"

One of my favorite pieces of obscure movie dialogue is from “Casablanca.” An old German married couple is practicing their halting English before leaving for America, and the husband asks her the time. “Liebchen, what watch?” “Ten watch.” “Such much?”

I thought of this while watching “The Judge,” a dramatic star vehicle for Robert Downey Jr., which he also produced. It has a solid premise and terrific performances by Downey and Robert Duvall (who deservedly earned an Oscar nomination for his work). But the movie is so overloaded with secondary characters and needless subplots the main dynamic is left weakened.

This is an ambitious film that suffers from a case of “such much.”

Downey plays Hank Palmer, a big-city attorney summoned back to his tiny backward Indiana hometown after the death of his mother. He and his dad, Joseph (Duvall), a prominent local judge, have never seen eye-to-eye, and it would seem that after the unpleasantness of the funeral they are both fully prepared to never speak again.

Then the judge is accused of deliberately running down the town miscreant – whom he sent to prison long ago – and Hank must defend him in court against a high-roller prosecutor (Billy Bob Thornton) brought in special to bring the elder Palmer down. The latter half or so of the movie is dominated by the trial, with all three actors spouting crackling dialogue and chewing the scenery. Good stuff.

But then there’s “the other.” An old flame of Hank’s (Vera Farmiga) now runs the local bar and seems to have an open window to his innermost psyche. His brothers are a cantankerous ex-pro baseball prospect and a feeble-minded boy/man who makes 8mm movies. Hank’s estranged daughter shows up for a visit. And a young town chick is looking for a hookup. And the prosecutor’s got a personal grudge against the Palmers. And it goes on.

Director David Dobkin and screenwriter Nick Schenk keep piling on the tertiary material, until the weight of it threatens to topple the delicate balance of volatile personalities that are the core of the film’s ample appeal.

“The Judge” is still worth watching, if only to see these veteran actors ply their craft. But when it comes to storytelling, sometimes having “such much” results in subtraction by addition.

Bonus features are merely adequate. The DVD has only a single featurette, “Getting Deep With Dax Shepard” (who has a small, funny part as an inept local attorney). Upgrade to the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack and you add a commentary track by Dobkin (so disappointing not to have Downey along for the ride!) plus deleted scenes with their own commentary.

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Review: "The Judge"

“The Judge” has all the hallmarks of a labor of love, and all the weaknesses. It features a couple of top-notch performances but it’s overlong and meandering, including a lot of stuff better left on the cutting room floor -- or better yet, in the screenwriters’ wastebasket.

The film stars Robert Downey Jr., who is the producer and put the project together with his wife, Susan, to create a legal drama in the vein of “The Verdict” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Unlike “The Verdict,” which was a character piece that should’ve won Paul Newman an Oscar, “The Judge” is more of a star vehicle for Downey to do what he does best.

We’ve seen him play this character for a while now, which is a variation on Downey’s own star persona -- super-smart guy, light-speed verbosity, can be alternately charming and bullying, a fundamentally good man who sometimes has to convince others, and himself, of that fact.

In this iteration he is Hank Palmer, a high-powered attorney who escaped his hated tiny hometown of Carlinville, Ind., but is called back after a tragedy, and then must deal with another. His opposite is his father, Joseph Palmer (Robert Duvall), an upstanding local judge for the past 42 years who regards Hank as an unwanted guest. There’s obviously an ocean of bad blood between these two.

Nick Schenk wrote the screenplay, later fixed up by Bill Dubuque, from a story that director David Dobkin and Downey (uncredited) came up with. Dobkin is a curious choice, known entirely for comedies both good (“Wedding Crashers”) and not so much (“Fred Claus”).

I think Dobkin needed to stand up to his star/boss a little more, and reel in some of the more sprawling aspects of the story and Downey’s performance. Downey is an amped-up powerhouse of a performer, much in the vein of John Malkovich, and left to his own devices tends to chew up the scenery. He does enjoy a few quieter moments where he’s just reacting to people or circumstances, and those are his best in the movie.

(Full disclosure: I interviewed Dobkin and Downey for a local TV station at the Indianapolis premiere, and had to miss the first 10 minutes or so of the movie to do so.)

Duvall is just splendid, and his performance only seems to grow sharper as the movie goes on. Judge Palmer is cussed and cantankerous, and demonstrates little superficial love to his two other sons, Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio), a former baseball prospect gone to seed, and Dale (Jeremy Strong), the mentally impaired baby who spends most of his time fiddling with 8mm film. To Hank, he shows only open hostility.

Things grow more complicated when the judge is charged with running down a man on a bicycle with his car, and Hank is eventually brought in to defend him, after the local yokel attorney/antique dealer (Dax Shepard) proves spectacularly unequal to the task.

The last half of the movie is mostly taken up by the trial, as Hank faces off with a slick prosecutor brought in special from Gary named Dwight Dickham (an intimidating Billy Bob Thornton), who seems to bear some kind of grudge against the Palmers.

There’s a strong through-line of a narrative in “The Judge,” but also way too many unnecessary elements. We’ve got Hank hooking up with an old flame (Vera Farmiga), who adores Hank for all his faults, including “that hyper-verbal vomit thing you do” -- which is a much better description of this Downey trait than the one I gave above.

And there’s drama about the dashing of Glen’s major league dreams, the death of the judge’s wife, a nasty old criminal case that haunts the current proceedings, a visit from Hank’s daughter, a kittenish bartender at the local pub (Leighton Meester) who hooks up with him and is later revealed to be … well, it’s just creepy.

There’s a lot good going on in “The Judge.” But at 141 minutes it needed a serious editing trim and/or screenplay rethink to hone it down. The essence is a triangle story with Downey, Duvall and Thornton each supporting one leg, and you don’t really need anything beyond that to muddy things up.

Video review: "The Conjuring"

It’s been a down year for animation but a hot time for horror, with “The Conjuring” one of the latest movie to scare up a lot of cash at the box office.

This summer hit stars Vera Farmiga as a demonologist who’s a clairvoyant to boot. Lorraine Warren and her husband Ed (Patrick Wilson) were normal, everyday people who investigate hauntings and participate in exorcisms as a vocation. In 1971 they encountered one of their worst cases ever, which formed the basis for this rollicking “true life” tale.

A couple moves into a lonely farmhouse with their five daughters and things start going bump in the night. All the clocks stop at the same time in the middle of the night, and a secret lair in the basement produces strange sounds and drafts. Eventually evil forces start threatening the children, so the Warrens have to team up to cast them out.

(Strangely, the film received an “R” rating from the MPAA, despite having no cursing and little gore.)
The strong part of the film is its focus on the exorcism duo as protagonists equal to the haunted couple. By depicting the Warrens as grounded folks who just happen to have made their careers in the occult, it makes the proceedings feel more plausible.

Directed by James Wan (“Saw”), “The Conjuring” starts out rather slowly, but when things get into full brimstone-and-holy-water mode, it’s a heckuva thrill ride.

Extras are just so-so. The DVD comes with a single featurette, “Scaring the ‘@$*%’ Out of You.’ Upgrade to the Blu-ray combo, and you add two more features: “The Conjuring: Face-to Face with Terror,” a making-of documentary, and “A Life in Demonology,” a look at the real-life Warrens.

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Review: "The Conjuring"

"The Conjuring" dredges up nearly every trope of the exorcism subgenre of horror, and faithfully puts its characters and the audience through the paces. It doesn't do much of anything that we haven't seen before, but what it does it does mostly well.

Director James Wan gained notoriety with "Saw," kicking off the (thankfully) now-waning "torture porn" fad. Here he turns to more cerebral frights, based on building a sense of dread mixed with sudden scares. The first half really drags, but once they get to the hard stuff of demonic possessions and thrashing exorcisms, it's a genuine thrill.

(I should point out that the R rating from the MPAA seems hard to justify. There is no cursing, sex or drugs, and though there is a constant threat of violence, very little of it actually occurs. "Overly forbidding" wouldn't seem to be part of the association's charter, but there you have it.)

Usually with these sorts of movies, the focus is on the family plagued with an ominous spirit, and the paranormal experts show up about halfway through. Here, the demonologists are just as much a part of the story as the haunted.

Like many movies of this ilk, we're assured that the events we're seeing are based on a true story. Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) were real-life occult investigators, who tried for decades to get a movie made about themselves. The idea is that although they have a really strange job, the Warrens are perfectly normal folks with a strong marriage, Christian values and a loving daughter.

We get to see them presenting film and audiotapes of their disturbing cases on college campuses, and it's pretty eye-opening stuff. One possessed man has bloody tears and speaks Latin, despite having only a third-grade education. Of course, what they encounter in the movie is far worse than anything they've seen before.

Parallel to the Warrens' story is the Perrons, Carolyn and Roger (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston). It's 1971 and they have just bought an old farmhouse cheap at auction to live with their five daughters, ranging in age from cute little pixie to surly teen. The house seems like a dream come true until, as they say, strange things star to happen.

Things go bump without explanation, clocks stop at precisely 3:07 a.m. every night, and the younger girls start to see things looming in dark spaces. They bust through a boarded-up stairwell and find a basement loaded with all sorts of cool stuff that just screams, "Evil spirits residing here!"

The strength of the film is depicting the Warrens as careful, rational people with lives outside their demon-hunting. For instance, Lorraine is a clairvoyant, meaning she can get a sense of the spiritual aura of things and people just by being near them. But their ghostly encounters each cost her a little piece of her own emotional stability.

Farmiga brings a matter-of-fact calm to her role, an unflashy sort of competence and groundedness that offsets nicely with her character's supernatural talents. The kid actors all acquit themselves nicely, particularly Joey King as the initial target of the spirit's ire.

I respected the craft with which "The Conjuring" was made, and its attempt to insert a little sober rationality into a familiar ghost story. It won't haunt your dreams, but this film will creep you out sufficiently for a couple of hours.

Review: Safe House

"Safe House" has a lot going for it, and a few bad things that don't spoil the ride.

It's a slick, plot-driven thriller about the nasty underside of the spy game. It's got Denzel Washington doing his smooth-talking thing, playing the man of quiet confidence who doesn't feel a need to broadcast his exceptional skills to the world. His actions speak louder than.

The action scenes, especially the car chases and hand-to-hand fisticuffs, are crisp and well-staged. And the supporting cast is top-notch, including Vera Farmiga, Brenda Gleeson and Sam Shepard, not to mention Ryan Reynolds, who for once is not doing that smarmy cad with the heart of gold thing.

Some of the plot twists aren't twisty enough to prevent the audience from seeing them coming a ways off, and the movie's villain might as well be walking around with an 'X' on their head. But still, it's an undeniably engaging piece of entertainment, a bit of sweet cinematic candy with a little salt to it.

Reynolds plays Matt Weston, a junior CIA agent with the worst posting possible: babysitting a safe house in Capetown, South Africa. These are the sort of places the spooks bring bad guys when they want to do things while the international community isn't watching. But Capetown is a sleepy burg, and Matt yearns for bigger things.

He gets his chance when a present arrives on his doorstep: none other than Tobin Frost, a living legend in the international espionage community. Tobin was once a top CIA agent himself, until he went rogue a decade ago.

Now he's got something really valuable, a computer file with Very Important Secrets. It's a classic MacGuffin -- nobody really knows what it is, but everyone wants it. Soon the safe house has been breached by bad guys, and it's up to Matt to bring Tobin in all by himself.

Tobin is one cool cat. When the goon squad threatens to waterboard him, he calmly informs them they're using the wrong thread of cloth to cover his face, then brags that he can last longer than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who managed 20 seconds. (A bit of Hollywood hoopla; Mohammed was reportedly waterboarded 183 times.)

Gleeson, the wonderful Irish actor, falls down while attempting an American accent -- no black mark there, since every U.K. thespian from Anthony Hopkins to Kate Winslet has punted in that regard. (The only truly good one I've heard, by which I mean I couldn't even detect the effort, was Aaron Johnson in "Kick-Ass.") He plays Barlow, a senior agency man and Matt's mentor.

Farmiga is Linklater, an ambitious rival of Barlow's who views Matt as an untested liability. Ruben Blades turns up as an old associate of Tobin, and Robert Patrick has a weary, professional air as the chief of the goon squad, tasked with doing stuff that isn't very pretty.

Rookie screenwriter David Guggenheim falls into some clichés, but the story has good pacing and chirpy dialogue. Director Daniel Espinosa provides a sure hand, pinning Matt as the unimpeachable white knight surrounded by figures of dubious intention -- including Tobin and the CIA bosses who want his head on a platter.

The interplay between the wily old Tobin and the inexperienced Matt is rather predictable, but is often delicious. Robin lectures and berates Matt like Hannibal Lecter toying with Clarice Starling, offering sage advice one minute and trying to rip his throat out the next.

Talk about on-the-job training.

3 stars out of four

Video review: "Source Code"

"Source Code" has one of those plots that you shouldn't spend too much time thinking about. It's a high-tech house of cards, with a science fiction backdrop that hasn't quite crossed all it's t's or dotted its i's.

There's time travel, sorta, and "Matrix"-like control of the human mind by nefarious forces. At the center, though, is a touching human story about a man trying to make sense of extraordinary circumstances.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, a helicopter pilot deployed in Afghanistan. He wakes aboard a speeding train, with a smiling woman (Michelle Monaghan) sitting across from him and talking to him like she knows him. He soon discovers that his consciousness has been projected into that of a man who's already dead -- because terrorists have blown up this train, killing everyone aboard.

Colter must repeat this scenario over and over until he discovers the identity of the bomber. In between his "missions," he finds himself in a strange metal pod, where a female commander (Vera Farmiga) whispers urgent instructions.

Even though the metaphysics of the story don't stand up to scrutiny, director Duncan Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley still manage to engage us with a sympathetic protagonist and the mystery of his plight.

Information on video extras was still a little sketchy at press time. According to preliminary reports, it will include a feature-length commentary by Jones and Gyllenhaal, interviews, trivia and experts talking about the science of time travel. I didn't get a review copy in time, so I can't say if these features are on both the DVD and Blu-ray versions, or just one.

Movie: 3 stars (out of four)
Extras: I (Incomplete)

Review: "Source Code"

Most science fiction thrillers get the "hardware" part of the movie right -- the technology, the fantastical shifting realities -- and skimp on the human stuff.

"Source Code" is the exact opposite: A flick that engages us with its protagonist and his plight, but the technical part of the story never really seems to add up. After the lights came on, I was left scratching my head trying to figure out the metaphysics and quantum mechanics of it all.

Still, I was caught up in the tale of Jake Gyllenhaal as a soldier on a mission to stop a speeding train loaded with a bomb. In the end, the whys and wherefores became less important to the cinematic experience than the urgency of this time-traveler's duty.

Now, see, I already misspoke. Technically, Colter Stevens is not traveling through time. You'll have to bear with me here, since I can't reveal too much about this movie without compromising its secrets.

Colter wakes up on a commuter train, a sleek modern double-decker hurtling toward Chicago. There's a pretty, friendly girl named Christina (Michelle Monaghan) sitting across from him who acts like she knows him. He goes into the lavatory and sees another man's face staring at him. He's just starting to make sense of it all when a fiery explosion engulfs everything.

Colter wakes up in a dark, dank metal prison, like a Mercury astronaut capsule sunk to the bottom of the ocean. A woman's voice, reassuring but commanding, appears on a speaker asking him to recount what just happened.

Next thing he knows, Colter is back on the train, waking up back where he started. The scenario seems to be playing out exactly the same way it did before ... or is it?

Colter, a helicopter pilot on tour in Afghanistan, soon learns what's going on: He's a recruit in a top-secret new military experiment in "time reassignment." It seems the human brain has a sort of short-term memory track, about eight minutes long, that scientists can access even after death. They also have the ability to project one's consciousness into a similar person's mind and control their actions.

To wit: Colter is sent into the head of a mild-mannered school teacher who must find the bomber from among the hundreds of people aboard the train. Strangely, Goodwin, the officer guiding him in his missions (the capable Vera Farmiga) instructs him not to worry about defusing the bomb, but locating who set it.
Is this an alternate reality? A time loop? A "Matrix"-like facsimile meant to dissemble?

Furthermore, how can Colter keep repeating those eight minutes over and over again, doing something different every time, a la "Groundhog Day," without ever being able to stop the bomb from going off?

(One hint is the code name of the operation, Beleaguered Castle, a form of solitaire in which the player tries to build the cards into foundations, but most games end in failure after just a few moves.)

Director Duncan Jones (who made the wonderful and little-seen "Moon" a couple years back) and rookie screenwriter Ben Ripley ably keep the audience misdirected, making the mechanics of what's happening seem less important than the exigency of it.

So beyond the obvious concern of finding the terrorist, we're constantly asking questions: What exactly is the teacher's relationship with Christina? Why does Goodwin seem a little sad behind the sternness? What are Colter's handlers not telling him?

With "Source Code," the audience may not always understand what's going on, but we care about the outcome.

3 stars out of four

Review: "Up in the Air"

What a breath of fresh air. "Up in the Air" is brave and true and unexpected.

It starts with a premise -- about people losing their jobs -- that is dour and daring material for a Hollywood film; and it ends in a way that is not tragic or fake-happy but feels like it has concluded exactly the way it should, and yet confounds expectations.

The movie, one of the year's finest, was directed by Jason Reitman, who after "Thank You for Smoking," "Juno" and this movie should be considered the top young filmmaker working today. Reitman and Sheldon Turner have co-written (from the novel by Walter Kim) a finely-tuned script that is hard-wired into the central nervous system of a country fretful about economic ruin.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a seemingly soulless corporate flunky who spent 322 days last year flying around the country telling people they've been laid off -- and he resents the 43 he had to spend in his antiseptic little apartment in Omaha.

The tribulations of modern travel that are so vexing to us -- the endless lines and numbing connection waits and impersonal security checkpoints -- Ryan takes to these like duck to water. His wallet is filled with a kaleidoscope of elite member cards that he waves like magic wands, transporting him to the front of all lines and making hassles vanish.

When we first meet Ryan, he is doing the thing he does so well: Telling people their jobs no longer exist. He does this respectfully, but firmly; he is prepared for his "clients" to cry, or fume, or even threaten and insult him. His job is to fire workers whose bosses are too cowardly to do it themselves, and with a minimum of legal exposure.

"We're here to make limbo tolerable," Ryan instructs an associate.

The scenes where Ryan lets people go are wrenchingly authentic. Reitman directs dozens of real people who have lost their jobs -- plus a few recognizable actors, like J.K. Simmons -- through their paces without a single false note.

With one in six Americans unemployed or underemployed, these sequences will have a special resonance for many in the audience who have had that soul-crushing experience themselves.

(They certainly did for me; my newspaper job became "no longer available," to use the movie's parlance, almost exactly one year ago from the day I saw this film.)

Two developments arrive to throw Ryan's life for a loop: His own job is about to become obsolete, and he meets a female version of himself who inspires him to think about pitching his suitcase permanently.

First, the former. Anna Kendrick plays Natalie, a 23-year-old hotshot who wants to make the impersonal nature of job layoffs even more so. Her idea: Save the expensive travel costs for people like Ryan and do the terminations via computer teleconferencing.

Even Ryan, who in his spare time gives de-motivational speeches urging people to dump all their personal baggage, is appalled by the indignity. But his bottom-line boss (Jason Bateman) wants to try it out.

Natalie's ambitious, but not a bad egg, as Ryan discovers when he takes her along on one of his extended layoff trips. Kendrick gives a layered, deeply-felt performance as a young woman who has a lot technological know-how, but knows little about how people tick.

Vera Farmiga plays Alex, Ryan's fellow traveler, who has quickie hook-ups with him whenever their flight plans align. It's a wonderfully perfect arrangement for two people who shirk any emotional tie-downs. When Alex tells Ryan that she is "the girl you don't have to worry about," his face glows with bliss.

I've already written 600 words about this movie, and could easily go another thirty score. Suffice to say that Ryan's journey is just beginning. The scene where he asks his stranger of a sister permission to give her away at her wedding, and is refused, packs as much emotional punch as anything I've seen this year.

For a story about a guy who spends his life "Up in the Air," this movie carries a bundle of weight.

3.5 stars