I can guarantee that you will not “enjoy” United 93, you will not find it entertaining or diverting or any of the things we’ve come to expect (or settle for) in our summer movies. I am equally confident that this film will move you more deeply and profoundly than anything you’ve seen in years, that you will be riveted by the experience in a way that makes other films seem petty and insignificant.

The only movie I can think of remotely comparable in its visceral effect is Schindler’s List and that film had the cushion of historical perspective; we knew going in that the holocaust was over, the monsters who perpetrated it utterly defeated and long dead. Not knowing how Al Qaeda’s war on modernity will unfold, we must watch this film without the comfortable certainty of a forgone conclusion.

The story of the passengers of United flight 93 ( “The Flight That Fought Back”) is already becoming legendary and it’s one of this film’s genuine achievements that while it is deeply respectful it is never reverential. It never devolves into the trite hagiography that would dehumanize the men and women it depicts. We don’t get a neatly packaged “back story” for any of the characters, but we do get the impression that their lives extend beyond the boundaries of the film. We overhear snippits of conversations and phone calls, but we never even catch the names of the people. It is exactly like our typical experience of fellow passengers on a plane trip. We are not surrounded by heroic characters or saints but by ordinary, flesh-and-blood people just like us.

In fact, the film is full of real people. FAA operations manager Ben Silney plays himself and the crew of the plane are portrayed by actual United pilots and stewardesses. This is just one of the techniques writer/director Paul Greengass (The Bourne Supremacy) employs to give the film a sense of urgent, objective reality. The film is shot in a loose, hand-held style and edited as if from available footage rather than meticulously composed shots.

The opening of the film could almost be a documentary about an airport. We see the mundane details of flight preparation, and without the context we bring with us, these montages would seem unremarkable, even dull. Greengrass never plays the scenes for suspense; he just presents them and lets us generate the tension. When, for instance, we see the plane being fueled up for its cross-continental journey, we know that those thousands of gallons of jet fuel are potentially a gruesomely effective weapon. The film never comments on this; it simply shows it and moves on, forcing us to make that connection.

This narrative strategy of elliptical storytelling, while common in top television shows (from The Sopranos to The Wire to Battlestar Galactica) is rarely used in movies, where we are usually spoon-fed the story. In United 93, we are constantly piecing information together for ourselves which automatically makes the film more engaging. Moreover, the people in the movie spend most of their time desperately trying to piece together the conflicting and confusing information they’re getting. We the audience are always a step ahead of them and this generates enormous tension while simultaneously making us re-live the confusion of that day.

You can expect to feel every emotion you had that day during the film. When they show the second plane crashing into the second tower, you will feel just as nauseous as you did five years ago. But what the film gives us that we couldn’t have that day is the catharsis of clear, deliberate action. At one point, the FAA director yells at an air force officer, “I don’t want more updates, I want action!” But there’s nothing anyone on the ground can do. So when the passengers realize that they are on a suicide mission and that they must take action, we feel grateful relief even though we know the tragic outcome.

Perhaps the film relies too heavily on the audience to provide its context. It may be that this film will have little or no emotional resonance for anyone who doesn’t already remember the events it depicts. I just don’t know. But however well or poorly the film ages, it is, right now, as powerful an experience as one can have in the cinema.

Again, I simply urge you to see it. And not for any political or sociological reasons. See it because it is a great and powerful film.

United 93 (2006)
Grade: A

Tom Cruise started the Mission: Impossible franchise 10 years ago as a director’s showcase. (Cruise has probably worked with more A-list directors than any star in history.) Brian De Palma (The Untouchables) helmed the first film and turned out one of the great suspense set pieces of his career: an elaborate break-in to an impenetrable room with Cruise suspended on wires. John Woo (Hard-Boiled) directed the second installment with tons of slow motion and none of the brio he brought to his Hong Kong action masterpieces.

It took a while to find a director for the third film. David Fincher (Fight Club) was attached to the project at one point, as was Joe Carnahan, based on his ludicrously over-rated film Narc. But Cruise finally settled on J. J. Abrams, the creator of the Lost and Alias TV series. Abrams is hardly a visual stylist on the level of De Palma or Woo, but he manages his story and his cast more deftly than either of his predecessors.

Mission: Impossible III has the same pacing, the same engaging-yet-predictable plot twists, and the same sense of humor as Alias. Not surprising, since Abrams brought along his writers and editor from the show as well as composer Michael Giacchino, who wrote the superb, Bond-inspired score for The Incredibles. Unlike Alias, the film doesn’t have to pretend that LA looks just like Berlin and Shanghai; it shows us the real thing. And cinematographer Dan Mindel brings the same rough-edged slickness we saw on display in The Bourne Identity.

None of the action set pieces have the punch that Steven Spielberg or Michael Mann, or even Doug Liman, can bring. One scene that unfolds on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge echoes James Cameron’s superb bridge chase from True Lies and clearly demonstrates the difference between solid craftsmanship and inspired artistry. But each of the big action beats tells part of the story, so we’re spared the kind of loud, gaudy, and perfectly superfluous displays that litter the films of Michael Bay and all his ilk.

It’s the attention to the story—to keeping the narrative brisk, clear, and engaging—that sets the film apart from the standard, formulaic Hollywood action orgy. The clever way the film deals with its McGuffin, for instance, minimizes needless exposition and maximizes the time we spend on thrills. (Ronin pulled a similar trick, with similarly good results.)

Driving the story is super spy Ethan Hunt, played by Cruise. Mr. Cruise may be a Scientologist and a nut case (isn’t that redundant?), but he’s got considerable talent as an actor. Very few actors can hold the center of a big action movie; just look at any of Nicholas Cage’s failed attempts. Cruise, like Sean Connery and Harrison Ford and virtually no one else, keeps you focused on the character rather than the pyrotechnic set pieces. That’s particularly impressive since Ethan Hunt is an even thinner character than James Bond or Indiana Jones.

While the movie is undeniably a star vehicle we get top-notch actors in every single supporting role, which gives the film an amazing energy. This is the first Mission: Impossible movie to make the IMF team a genuine part of the story. Particularly delightful is Simon Peg (Shaun of the Dead) as a lab technician who talks Cruise through the back streets of Shanghai over the phone. And with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Maggie Q, Billy Crudup, and Keri Russell on hand, there’s not only tons of acting talent, but eye candy aplenty for every taste, gender, and orientation.

Best of all, on the acting talent front, is Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain Owen Davian. Hoffman deliciously underplays his role, which makes him much scarier than a bombastic, larger-than-life villain could be. When Davian starts quietly and matter-of-factly threatening Hunt and his girlfriend, the effect is monstrous and chilling.

Michelle Monaghan, as Hunt’s fiancé Julia, is good too, but her role is so slight she never make much of an impression. Since so much of the plot revolves around her, that’s a serious weakness. We know Hunt cares deeply about her, but we never get a chance to share those feelings.

While it’s hardly the best this genre has to offer, Mission: Impossible III gets the job done with style. It’s exactly what Cruise’s career needs right now and exactly what we want for the summer.

Mission: Impossible III (2006)
Grade: B

Usually when a film is based on a book, the book is better. Occasionally though the movie clearly surpasses its source material; The Wizard of Oz and The Godfather are prime examples. But I can’t think of a single example of a movie based on a play that is clearly better than the original. Theatrical drama does not translate well into cinematic drama.

Proof makes a lousy movie out of what I suspect was a pretty lousy play to begin with. The story deals with the brilliant-but-unstable daughter of a recently-deceased brilliant-but-unstable math professor. The daughter has to deal with her father’s legacy, her father’s worshipful student, and her annoying sister. We have to deal with endless, repetitive speeches from all these people.

The whole film feels elaborately contrived and artificial, from the plot twists, to the dialogue, to the opaque character motivations. Nobody behaves in a realistically human manner. And although the film revolves around a mathematical proof, we never have any idea what it is or why it’s so important. The characters here are so boring that you really do find yourself wishing they’d talk more about math.

The actors are all talented and doing everything they can with such material. Jake Gyllenhaal seems more impressive every time you see him on screen; he totally inhabits every character he plays. Anthony Hopkins couldn’t give a bad performance if he tried. Gwyneth Paltrow is even able to project the emotional urgency of her character through the fog of plot contrivance and stilted dialogue, but we never for one second buy her as a mathematical genius.

The movie feels very stagy and claustrophobic. Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) never finds a way of getting beyond the theatrical roots of the material. It’s very hard for a movie to create the urgent intimacy that comes naturally to live theater. Proof demonstrates that conclusively.

Proof (2005)
Grade: C-

Miracle is a standard docudrama recounting the training and victory of that gold medal team. The film hits all the usual sports movie clichés hard and delivers just exactly what it promises. The most interesting part of the film is how the coach, Herb Brooks as played by Kurt Russell, plays head games with his team. He manipulates their responses with Machiavellian panache, which makes him a darker and more interesting character than the film ever seems willing to acknowledge. Russell brings his usual solid craftsmanship to the role and has some fine moments, but he can’t really do much with such an underwritten character.

The team members are anonymous, interchangeable guys played by anonymous, interchangeable actors. Half-hearted attempts to individualize them never amount to much. One is grieving the loss of his mother, one is upset with a team mate about . . . something, one refuses to take a psychological test (or is that the same guy with the dead mother?). Anyway, they all look and act so much alike that you begin to wonder if this is a movie about clones.

There’s a lot of hockey in this film, none of it filmed in a particularly interesting way. The final game against the Russians feels like an uncut rebroadcast of the original game. And the thrill of victory doesn’t hit home the way it should because we’re not given compelling reasons to care. The game is framed more politically than personally, an antidote to the nation’s Carter malaise rather than a personal victory for the coach or the team. We’re happy that they won, and that the game is finally over, but we don’t get a sense of why it matters personally.

Twenty six years later, I still can’t see what all the fuss is about.

Miracle (2004)
Grade: C+

Jarhead is a superbly well-made mediocre film. It’s a frustrating example of the whole being less than the sum of the parts.

The parts are all very fine indeed. The film looks spectacular. The skillful, disciplined cinematography, by Coen brothers favorite Roger Deakins, is impressively expressive without being showy (unlike, say, the shallow pyrotechnics of Three Kings). It’s the first major post-Saving Private Ryan war film not to feel totally beholden to that masterpiece’s visual style, largely — no doubt — because Jarhead avoids any big battle sequences.

The editing displays Walter Murch’s typically artful grace. Scenes and shots flow together with quiet precision. The rhythms of pacing are finely modulated in every mood and tone from exuberant energy to quite brooding, all with equal dexterity.

The performances are uniformly fine. Jake Gyllenhaal, as Desert Storm marine Swofford, is expressive and vital and raw (not to mention buffed up as hell). Peter Sarsgaard, quite possibly the finest actor of his generation, turns in yet another quietly brilliant performance (in yet another thankless supporting role) as Swofford’s best friend Troy. Jamie Foxx inhabits Staff Sgt. Sykes with the same commitment and verve he brought to Ray or Collateral.

If you watched any individual scene on its own, you’d be sure you were seeing a really good movie. There are lots of precisely observed details of marine life that are funny or scary or sad. And many of the scenes have a wonderful surrealistic edge to them: marines playing football in their gas masks, dueling scorpions as a spectator sport, burning oil wells scorching the sky. There are good moments a plenty, more than in most films.

So what went wrong? Well, there’s really no story here. We get a sequence of chronological events, most of them quite interesting, but nothing that happens to the characters ultimately matters very much. The movie tries to capture the frustration of not going to war, but it just winds up being frustrating for us. It’s finally a hollow film, all texture and no substance.

Director Sam Mendes seems desperate to make a powerful anti-war film, and he clearly realizes that the very excitement of battle on screen can turn even the most rigorously anti-war polemic into an exciting experience of war. There’s an early scene where the marines watch Apocalypse Now, cheering the action on as if it were a Rambo movie. To forestall this reaction, Mendes just avoids any direct depiction of war. The soldiers never get the chance to fight and so we never get the chance to cheer them on. As a story-telling strategy this is clearly self-defeating because showing people not fighting conveys no message whatsoever about the virtues or vices of warfare.

Of course Mendes is simply adapting the memoir of the real-life Gulf War veteran Tony Swofford. But that’s no excuse for making a pointless film.

Jarhead (2005)
Grade: C+

If you didn’t know better, you’d swear that Match Point was the work of some promising newcomer, not the pathetic has-been that Woody Allen has become. Allen’s maddening, OCD insistence on making a new film every single year results in way too many half-baked movies that feel more like rough drafts and sketches than actual films (for an example, see any film he’s made in the past ten years–or better yet, don’t!).

Match Point is smart and sleek and sexy, a little jewel of a film that runs like clockwork. The story involves Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) a former tennis pro who falls for the wrong woman, Nola (Scarlett Johansson). I can’t for the life of me understand why Rhys Meyers isn’t already a huge star or how Johansson ever became one, but both deliver star-making performances here.

Doom seems to hover over events from the moment our two main characters meet. We know this can’t end well for them, and Allen does a fine job exploiting that tension. There’s an escalating sense of claustrophobia as Chris gets locked ever more deeply into a life of privilege that he both desperately wants and desperately wants to escape.

One of the pleasures of the film is the way it slowly and carefully develops from a delicately observed character piece into an edge-of-your-seat film noir. Most thrillers don’t have the patience to get inside the emotional lives of their characters, just as most Indie dramas don’t have the patience for anything so vulgar as plot. In combining the two, this film reveals just how much both genres are missing.

The painful emotional honesty of the film’s first half makes the Hitchcockian final act all the more riveting. We understand Chris and Nola from the inside, we know how they feel and why they do everything they do. So when the situation unravels, as we know it must, the results are excruciatingly painful for us as well as for them.

The film does have the unfortunate habit of over explaining things. Occasionally a scene will make a character or plot point in a subtle way only to be followed by a clunky piece of exposition in which somebody tells us what the movie has already artfully shown. Worse still are the interruptions for philosophical exposition. The film contains several dull speeches about the nature of luck, to make sure we know what the THEME is.

But just about everything else in the movie works beautifully, from the splendid supporting cast, to the loving depiction of London, to the opera music score. This level of craftsmanship makes the film a pleasure to watch from its slick opening tracking shot to its tantalizing, ambiguous ending.

Match Point (2005)
Grade: B+

Which brings us to Rent, a spectacularly crappy musical that, along with the equally spectacularly crappy Phantom of the Opera, should pretty much euthanize the movie musical for a decade or so.

Why did they let Chris Columbus direct this film? Why do they let Columbus direct anything? Why is the director of Bicentennial Man even allowed within 500 yards of a movie camera? Ever? Who knows. Columbus certainly managed to make a royal mess of this film. There’s not one iota of creativity here. Everything is shot in the dullest most obvious way possible so as not to over-stimulate, or even stimulate, the audience.

The whole thing is a drearily faithful adaptation of the Broadway original. Columbus even managed to get most of the original cast to reprise their roles for film. That sounds like a great idea, but it’s not for two reasons. First, the cast is all 10 years too old for their roles. Whatever energy the story has comes from the desperate struggles of a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to make it in New York. With a bunch of thirty-somethings it just becomes pathetic and creepy. Second, the cast brings with them the ghosts of all those stage performances past, never really managing to make the roles come alive for film. It feels like an historical reenactment society: you can almost imagine what the original must have been like, and it was clearly nothing like the sorry sight unfolding before your eyes.

But even without unimaginative direction and stale casting choices, the film would still be saddled with the original musical itself. For that we have to blame the late Jonathan Larson.

In a way, Larson’s earnestly unsubtle work finds a perfect expression in Columbus’s earnestly unsubtle direction. But it’s a union of substance and style that only exacerbates the weaknesses of both. By trying to marry rock to the traditional Broadway score, Larson sadly achieved music that has neither the vibrancy and immediacy of contemporary rock nor the polish and wit of a good old-fashioned musical. The songs make blandly obvious statements about the characters in blandly obvious ways with thumping, predictable rhymes. The only decent number is “Seasons of Love”; the rest are utterly and instantly forgettable. By all accounts, Larson’s first and only musical (he died shortly after the premiere) was invigorating on stage, but then again so was Hair. Neither musical has aged well and neither translates well to the screen.

The story, such as it is, is supposed to be a modernization of La Boheme, but it never gets beyond the cuteness of its own conceit the way that, say, West Side Story does. We see characters die from AIDS instead of tuberculosis; that’s the level of “invention.” Rent is deadly serious about its live-for-today message, but earnest adolescent posturing is not art, and it’s certainly not entertainment.
Rent (2005)
Grade: D