Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

“Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire”

USA. 2009. Directed by Lee Daniels. Screenplay by Geoffrey Fletcher. Based on the novel, “Push” by Sapphire. Starring: Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique, Paula Patton, Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, Sherri Shepherd, Stephanie Andujar, Chyra Layne, Xosha Roquemore, Amina Robinson, Angelic Zambrana, Aunt Dot and Nealla Gordon.

Rating: ★★★★

When we initially meet the titular heroine of Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, we can hardly imagine harsher or nastier familial circumstances than the domestic environs and daily routine she has to endure. She is clammed up in her own shell barely registering her middle school surroundings other than when she suddenly lashes out at another student for mocking her about her weight. She is already 16 and still barely passing through middle school in reading and writing literacy. And despite being only 16, she is already pregnant with her second child from incestuous abuse by the hands of her father. Her mother does not treat her much better, as vitriolic words spew out from the mother’s inner, selfish jealousy towards her daughter for “stealing away” her man.

This is the launching point for director Lee Daniels’ film, which starts from the deepest and harshest maws of despair and somehow salvages us to an ultimately rewarding conclusion. The movie does not flinch in its portrayal of pure human ugliness with its ruthless intensity and authenticity. This is particularly true in the first agonizing 20 minutes, where we see the father knocking her unconscious and raping her and the mother not only turns a blind eye to the abuse but treats her daughter as competition for her own "love" rather than the child she should love. What makes it one of the best films of the year is how its moves to an unusually uplifting outcome that is just as authentic by having it come about from our gradual embrace of its lead protagonist’s inner spirit and the courage she finally musters up to break free from the forces that have crushed her for so long.

The year is 1987 and the heroine is Clarice “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), who unsurprisingly has simply emotionally shut down and the only escape she has is in fanciful daydream sequences shot in flashing reds and white lights in which she imagines herself as a famous fashion celebrity in the limelight. In her inner city school in New York City, the principal, after hearing about her low grades in addition to her second pregnancy, decides that she should go to an alternate school called Each One/Teach One where she can attain her GED. Precious’ coarse and vitriolic mother, Mary (Mo’Nique), of course, mocks and curses at her, seeing that she sees no use for Precious in school and would just rather see her resort to welfare. With a personal encouragement of the school principal who visits her home, however, she sets her mind to attend Each One/Teach One.

The school is where she finds her first ray of light in her teacher, Ms. Rain (Paula Patton). Of course, Precious can hardly open herself up to anything in the class and can hardly even seem to mutter when she tries to talk about herself, although that gradually starts to change with Ms. Rain’s encouragement. The second ray of light comes from a kind social worker, Ms. Weiss (Mariah Carey) and both Ms. Rain and Ms. Weiss gradually take a personal interest to help this girl perhaps because neither of them could think of anyone else who could be in worse circumstances than the one Precious has had to endure.

It is astonishing how Daniels, along with his writer, Geoffrey Fletcher, who adapts the novel, Push by Sapphire, is able to orchestrate all these harsh melodramatic elements and this unusually eclectic cast together to form an emotional whole. The casting choices may seem rather laughable and off-putting on paper just as Daniels’ first directorial feature, Shadowboxer did for the few people who saw that obscure film. That film, if you may recall, had Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Helen Mirren starring as two assassins having a tortured, incestuous step-mother and son relationship. The story in that film really tried to do too many risky and outrageous things that it ultimately shattered its own test tubes. But a director who is that bold and out there is sooner or later destined to make a great film and Daniels, who also produced other films with incendiary subject matter such as Monster’s Ball and The Woodsman, finally has with a tighter coherence and the purer emotional focus he brings to his individual characters.

That focus here extracts uncommonly strong performances from the entire cast. Mo’Nique has already been receiving well-deserved awards attention for playing the monstrous mother who, in her best and most vulnerable scene, shows that, in the end, she is also painfully human and real even if it does not excuse the way she has treated her daughter. It is also nice to see Paula Patton, who really should get more substantial lead roles, turn her naturally tender on-screen sensibilities to bring some much needed warmth to this film. The biggest surprise, however, is from none other than Mariah Carey, who delivers such an emotionally guileless and natural performance as the social worker that it makes one forget all about Glitter. Also, look for rock star Lenny Kravitz who disappears into playing a gentle nurse’s aide in one of the film’s lighter, humorous moments where Precious’ classmates are a little bit too blunt in expressing how they have never having seen a male nurse’s aide before.

Then there is Gabourey Sidibe. I am afraid that she is already getting sidelined by her supporting cast where much of the attention is going and that is a shame because it is really her mesmerizing debut performance that really grips our attention the most like a vice. Watch the way she shows her struggling to mutter words and yet is able to suggest with her eyes that she has an intelligent mind ticking inside her desiring to learn and make better of herself. The fiery courage that will guide her is already in there waiting to flower and it is what instantly and subtly wins our hearts over for Precious.

I said that the movie is unusually uplifting by its end and I do not mean that it is so in the conventional sense we often get in the movies. There is nothing that suddenly lifts Precious from her circumstances and predicament such as someone to help her become the fashion celebrity she fantasizes herself of becoming in her daydreams. What Precious ultimately learns is that the only person who can help her situation is her own self and that solely emotional triumph and realization to live her life as she finally wants is far more rewarding and moving than any other worldly force that whisks and sweeps her away.

Up

“Up”

USA. 2009. Directed by Pete Docter and co-directed by Bob Peterson. Screenplay by Bob Peterson and Pete Docter. Story by Bob Peterson, Pete Docter and Thomas McCarthy. Starring: the voices of Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer, Bob Peterson, Delroy Lindo, Jerome Ranft, John Ratzenberger, David Kaye, Elie Docter and Jeremy Leary.

Rating: ★★★★

The latest wonderful movie from the geniuses at Pixar, Up at last brings us an adventure that so cheerfully and confidently goes against the grain of today's culture over-fixated on youth by presenting a hero that also happens to be a curmudgeonly old man. Most family adventure stories present their protagonists as the typical young gung-ho personalities that are at times actually too callow to realistically deal with their surroundings and as a result the adventures themselves are often so considerably dumbed down. This film, by centering on an older hero who has retained a nugget of adventurous idealism his whole life allows all the characters and story to have more real emotions and stakes.

The film first opens with wide-eyed, 7-year-old adventure scout named Carl Fredricksen, who dreams of going to a lush place in South America called Paradise Falls. He then meets his match in a girl named Ellie, another young explorer who shares the same dream and is even more avid than Carl is. This at first seems like the setup for a typical children’s adventure but then quickly and surprisingly segues into a lovely opening montage of their eventual courtship and later marriage. They save money to pursue their dream of traveling to Paradise Falls but everyday life and welfare intervenes with their savings. A tire breaks down, the house needs repairs and hospital bills stack up particularly as Ellie becomes progressively ill in their older years. This montage that is so impeccably and movingly told without dialogue and serves as merely the setup for our 78-year old protagonist, Carl (Ed Asner) and the rest of the movie is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Soon, Carl is left as a widower and is then threatened to be placed in a retirement home. So what does he do to honor Ellie’s memory and fulfill their dream without ever actually stepping outside his home? He tethers thousands of balloons to his house to float it to the sky. Everyone who has seen the poster or the previews already knows that but the sequence of the house making its ascent in its entirety is a pure, colorful marvel to behold on screen, particularly with the equally elegant score by Michael Giacchino, as it perfectly captures that blithe feeling one gets when seeing a hot air balloon lift off the ground.

Just when Carl is about to relax by himself all the way to Paradise Falls, however, he suddenly hears a startling knock on the door and finds that there is a stowaway on board, an Asian-American boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai) who is aspiring to be an adventure scout not unlike how Carl was when he was young. Carl, being the initially cranky man that he is, finds him a nuisance particularly after due to his earlier encounter with Russell and his unusual persistence to help out an elderly man for a merit badge from his scout leader. Of course, Carl does not have the option to kick him out of the house (although there is a brief, funny fantasy moment in which he fleetingly entertains that thought).

Much more about their eventually very touching bond and the rest of their adventure, I would hesitate to reveal, including the villain of the story that Pixar wisely makes a point of not revealing too much and does arrive as something of a meaningful surprise in this one. What I will mention are some ingenious, inspired sights and ideas in the film. One is how they skewer the old, silly cliché of talking dogs with some dogs Carl and Russell encounter. Audiences have complained for years about how dogs moving their mouths to talk about humans always look so ridiculous, no matter how hard they try to make it convincing with special effects (the truly awful Good Boy! comes to mind from several years back). This movie comes up with the brilliant, satirical solution of having collars around the dogs’ necks that hilariously act like ventriloquist sound devices that translate the dogs’ thoughts into human language.

Another is the huge, magnificent airship that Carl and Russell later end up in, which perhaps takes its slight cue from some of Hayao Miyazaki’s films such as Castle in the Sky or Howl’s Moving Castle. All the tiny details including the methods of steering, the wings and the ropes that tether the ship to its ballast are meticulously introduced to deliver all kinds of surprises in the climactic adventure. That it belongs to the story's antagonist is crucial, as contrasting it to the protagonist’s vehicle symbolically signifies the disparate personalities they represent in balancing self-aspirations and reality.

Up, after Ratatouille and WALL·E, is the third great movie in a row for Pixar and a personal triumph for director, Pete Docter for whom this is a significant leap forward from his last film, Monsters, Inc (in addition to having contributed to writing the Toy Story movies and WALL·E). It has, of course, become passé to say that Pixar is making more mature stories that will give adults as much, if not more, reason as children to go see these animated films. However, in another sense, just as many English scholars would give so much of their knowledge to relive their first thunderstruck impression of reading a Shakespeare play, I would envy children who get to enjoy these films on their own level and then later discover deeper levels anew as they grow up with repeat viewings over the years.

The movie also marks the first Pixar film rendered in 3-D and, although I am still not convinced about the necessity of the technique’s existence, I will say that it is as well done here as I have seen in any film so far. There are a few sequences that do get more visual enhancement due to the 3-D such as the dazzling house floating sequence in the beginning and they wisely completely avoid having objects purposely flying out of the screen to “grab” the audience (if anything, for me at least, that actually prevents me from getting closer to the movie itself). But the real strength of the film, as with all Pixar features, lies in the storytelling that, as of yet, 3-D has yet to really make a contribution to. Until the technique can offer something beyond a small, extra sense of visual spectacle (and perhaps James Cameron’s long-anticipated live-action 3-D film, Avatar coming in December will change this), there is not much lost watching a great movie like this in just the 2-D format.

Beyond the astonishing, crisp visual sights, however, what remains the most indelible in the end is Carl himself, so wonderfully and wittily voiced by the veteran actor, Ed Asner. This is where the montage is once again so key because we need it to understand the depths beyond Carl who may seem like just a lonely, cranky old man we see around the block before the adventure starts where he proves to be more physically agile than we expect (though never in an impossible way). The contribution of writer, Thomas McCarthy, whose last film was the wonderful The Visitor, must have been invaluable to understanding that similar theme of a man breaking free from years of emotional inertia and regaining vitality and meaning in his life. And the movie never makes the misstep of having Carl foolishly sidelined or outsmarted by the child, Russell (adorably voiced without cloying by newcomer Jordan Nagai). Not that Russell does not serve as a nice point of empathy for kids but Carl remains the hero and this is centrally his story.

As aforementioned, Up, like all true and great family movies, will appeal to kids and adults in different ways but I would particularly recommend that grandparents take their young grandchildren to see this or vice versa. By having younger audiences cheer for a hero who carries a lifetime of experience and heart and the adults identify with a hero who rejuvenates himself through adventure, watching this could bridge some gaps that neither they nor their grandparents knew existed. And if that sounds a bit too serious, only the Pixar folks can combine that with an exuberant adventure that resists conforming to Hollywood clichés and familiar genre conventions.

Let the Right One In

“Let the Right One In”

Sweden. 2008. Directed by Tomas Alfredson. Screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist based on his own novel. Starring: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist, Mikael Rahm, Karl Robert Lindgren, Ika Nord, Peter Carlberg, Anders Peedu, Paul Olofsson and Cayetano Ruiz.

Rating: ★★★★

The Swedish movie, Let the Right One In takes the elements of a vampire film and sifts them brilliantly and unflinchingly through the harsh troubles of a pre-adolescent. I never imagined a movie could remind me of the sometimes merciless cruelty of junior high kids in Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and the oppressive fatalism of F.W. Murnau’s classic 1922 silent film, Nosferatu at the same time. But this one did in its brutal yet heartfelt study of two 12-year olds, or more accurately, a 12-year old boy and a girl vampire stuck at 12, who are brought together by need, loneliness and the alienation from everyone else.

The boy is blonde-haired Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), who lives with his divorced mother though neither she nor his father really wants or pays attention to him. Thus, he can hardly share his troubles in school, where he gets picked on by a sadistic bully who does not stop at repeatedly calling him names like “piggy” and flicking his nose but also coerces his classmates into whipping his body and across his face. Leading such a dreary life, one can see why he is almost driven to befriend the pale-faced Eli (Lina Leandersson), even if she turns out to be a vampire.

The best vampire movies understand that living forever in a fallen world feeding off other humans’ blood is an eternally dooming curse and so it is for Eli, whom we later realize has lived at the age of 12 for about 200 years. She also cannot go out into sunlight, of course, and Oskar first sees her sitting in solitude at the jungle gym outside their apartment late at night while he is acting out with a knife on a tree a pretense of revenge towards his cruel bullies. It is certainly peculiar that he does not observe sooner that she is sitting so comfortably in the dead cold of a Swedish winter in just her pajamas and we sense that perhaps he has been so lonely and beaten down by life to notice. They find out that they actually live next door to each other although she warns him, “You can’t be friends with me.”

But they do become friends and even deeper although romance may be too simple a word to describe their strong bond. Perhaps it seems that way for Oskar at least initially as he coyly asks her, “Will you be my girlfriend?” to which Eli replies, “I am not a girl.” It is much deeper than romance in many ways, however, because it is forged by their urge to find a degree of trust and comfort away from their bleak despair – with one caused by external circumstances and the other by their internal violent nature (unless one considers being turned into a vampire after being bitten circumstantial, too).

The relationship that is so impeccably and naturally acted by Hedebrant and Leandersson brings a center of warmth and some humor in a movie that has an overall suitably bleak tone (and the film is no doubt inappropriate for most pre-teens). I have not gone into the grimmest elements including a subplot involving a serial killer, Håkan (Per Ragnar) who targets teenage boys at night. The gloom of everything around only accentuates the symbiotic relationship that Oskar and Eli build. Initially, of course, we vaguely fear for Oskar whom we sense may be playing with fire but he is well past the point of being surprised, and when he is so neglected by his parents or physically beaten by his peers, befriending a vampire may bring safety and even empathy (albeit it could also possibly encourage some darker, pathological deeds).

The movie is directed by Tomas Alfredson and adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel and is certainly one of the most atmospheric and visually stunning films of the year. One shrewd artistic choice that I particularly admired in their highly wintry color palette is how it uses the hues of red against our own expectations. We know that we will see blood in a vampire story but Alfredson and his cinematographer, Hoyte van Hoytema drain out its color to border on black so that the brighter, truer reds are left to Oskar and then particularly Eli’s clothing that reflect the warmth that the two share in their friendship. Also, the violence and shocks (including a very subtle moment when Eli suddenly scales up the walls of a hospital building) are executed for maximum effect because they are always seen with a static, level eye, usually at a distance, and never in cheap close-up. One memorably horrific sequence in which severed body parts fall underwater is sure to become a classic cinematic shot along the lines of similar ones in Jaws.

Despite that this is one of the best vampire movies ever made and also one of the best of the year, I am afraid that any description of the movie will drive away many audiences who will feel the movie is too dark and rather go for a more conventional teen romance like the movie adaptation of the book, Twilight. And yet again, the rights of the original book have been bought for another remake to be directed by Matt Reeves of Cloverfield fame. Although the remake will reportedly be another re-interpretation of the original source novel, Alfredson has said that he fears the movie will become too mainstream and I share those fears, too. One of the movie’s really great qualities is its methodical pacing to let the film's characters and story developments never obviously explain themselves and just silently creep up for us to piece together and understand like Eli herself. That is a trait Hollywood seems either unable or unwilling to exercise in most dramatic horror movies these days (and even a good vampire movie like 1994’s Interview with the Vampire fell short of greatness because it concentrated too much on mood without much of a story).

The movie’s title, Let the Right One In is one whose meaning we do not quite comprehend until later in the film when there is an interesting spin on the old myth that a vampire cannot enter a room until a person invites them in. A closer study of the title may warrant more than one viewing: One through Oskar’s eyes and the other through Eli’s. Then we can see how each one’s needs are so very different, making their understanding of each other profound and their bond either rewarding or just disturbingly fleeting.

The Dark Knight

“The Dark Knight”

USA. 2008. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan. Story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer. Based on characters created by Bob Kane. Starring: Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman, Monique Curmen, Ron Dean, Cillian Murphy, Chin Han and Eric Roberts.

Rating: ★★★★

From the very opening minutes of Christopher Nolan's brilliant The Dark Knight, I quickly shed off the feeling that I was watching a “superhero” movie. If there is a movie that can truly be labeled as transcendent, it is this sequel that elevates itself to an epic crime story and a deep, heartbreaking tragedy. The genre’s emotional and philosophical capacities have been rewritten.

The 2005 Batman franchise reboot, Batman Begins chronicled the journey of Gotham City billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in the aftermath of his parents’ murders and his ultimate decision to channel his anguish over that loss into a determination to fight his city's crime and corruption. The Dark Knight puts that decision to the ultimate test with the introduction of The Joker, who is played by the late great Heath Ledger in one of the most nerve-wracking villain performances ever. What makes him more menacing is that he crafts diabolical situations that build into ethical tightropes that cause the Batman and others to perhaps compromise their very own core values to protect the city. The Joker is not clownish or jocose anymore but, as his entrance with the disappearing pencil trick firmly establishes, he is just plain scary.

Batman himself is already drawing massive scorn from Gotham’s citizens who believe he is nothing more than just another vigilante despite that he has secretly been working closely with good cop, Lt. Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) to clean up the streets. The Joker is disgusted at how the mobsters fear their days may be numbered and, contrary to Bruce’s initial surmise that he must be looking for some quick reward, his only purpose is to inject pure criminal evil into the city and humiliate all those who uphold justice including Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), Bruce’s high-tech guru and Wayne Corp’s board director, District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes from the first film). As Bruce’s loyal butler, Alfred (Michael Caine) says to Bruce at one point, he is one of the “people who just wants to watch the world burn.”

Such a storyline could tempt the filmmakers to make the movie into an overt villain-oriented showcase, which was the crucial drawback of Jack Nicholson’s flashy version of the Joker in Tim Burton’s original Batman. The poetically written screenplay by director Christopher Nolan and his brother, Jonathan makes sure that Ledger’s rendition occupies just the appropriate amount of space in the overall terrific ensemble and canvas. Every performance is exceedingly good from Eckhart’s Dent finding his moral rectitude progressively scarred by tragedy to Gary Oldman’s Gordon who must deal with the increasing emotional toll of remaining the sanest and most upstanding cop in the city. All of this, of course, leads back to Bruce Wayne on whose face, as portrayed by Bale, we can see the psychic trauma this new breed of crime is causing as he finds himself capable of doing things he never thought he would do.

Unavoidably, it is hard to shake off the shadow of the late Ledger, especially considering the rumors that his extremely committed effort to immerse into his character led to the deep depression that may have indirectly claimed his life. While that may philosophically bring into question the potentially severe tolls of intense, method acting, from the frightening makeup to the affected accent indicative of the wound-inflicted smile on the Joker’s face, this remarkable accomplishment Ledger has left on the screen will no doubt catapult him up to the rank of other similar legends like James Dean and Bruce Lee who tragically never fully lived out their career highlight. If, come Oscar® season next year, he becomes the first posthumous acting nominee since Massimo Troisi in 1994's Il Postino or even the first posthumous acting winner since Peter Finch in 1976's Network, it will be far from a vote of compassion.

While the story is powerfully propelled into near biblical proportions under the reins of director Christopher Nolan, the film also responds to the slight common criticism of the first film in its action choreography. Like the first film, Nolan uses special effects sparingly and only when necessary and the shooting style of his action is much more confident in resorting less to quick-cutting and letting the camera remain mostly static to capture the rousing, old-fashioned stunts and fight scenes filmed in Chicago (with a brief, thrilling detour to Hong Kong). And if you think the trailers have already revealed the big money shots like the gigantic semi being flipped over or the Batpod, rest assured the complete ingenuity of their triggers is not given away and the extended sequences in full are as pulsating as any crime picture from the golden age of the 70s or Michael Mann's Heat (which Nolan cites as a major influence).

The Dark Knight is not only an improvement over the already great Batman Begins but a most ambitious marriage of allegorical artistry and pop entertainment (and, for once, the movie’s gargantuan hype and record smashing box office results are truly wholly deserved). It also represents the peak of this decade’s continuing renaissance of superhero movies that began with the classical entertainment of the Spider-Man movies. Now, with a superhero who resides in a very real, fallen, crime-ridden world like ours, The Dark Knight expands and deepens the Batman persona to even spiritual levels to explore how a troubled hero must learn to adapt to impossible sacrifices lest he quickly succumb to pride and villainy.

WALL·E

“WALL·E”

USA. 2008. Directed by Andrew Stanton. Screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Jim Reardon. Story by Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton. Starring: the voices of Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Kim Kopf, Kathy Najimy, John Ratzenberger and Sigourney Weaver, and Fred Willard.

Rating: ★★★★

The word, wondrous was invented for movies like WALL·E, which is more than perfectly fitting for a movie all about wonder and curiosity. Many great Pixar movies from the Toy Story movies to Ratatouille have presented the trait of inquisitiveness as a virtue (though often resulting in a perilous but valuable journey) and in this film, it now becomes the key central subject. Exploring that subject through the eyes of a robot, the animators at Pixar stake their trademark of visual splendor in the sci-fi genre.

Telling a good story is something the Pixar folks have never lost sight of and it is all the more remarkable here that it is done with so little dialogue. The first third of this movie is just a masterpiece of pure visual character-driven storytelling as we meet WALL·E (a Waste Allocation Load Lifter, Earth-class) who is apparently left all alone on earth compacting and piling trash. He also has that little quality called curiosity as he has collected various items from the garbage from Christmas lights to a video tape of his favorite musical, Hello, Dolly! in his little home that is just an old storage place. At night, he “sleeps” by taking off his wheels and resting and lowering his head into his cubical body.

WALL·E’s only companion on earth so far has been a small cockroach but his rather lonely routine changes when he follows a red beacon that leads him to the site of a docking spaceship (which he barely avoids getting crushed by via vigorously digging his way into the ground). Out of the spaceship comes another robot, EVE (an Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) who is looking around for any signs of plant life. WALL·E is instantly smitten with her though she unfortunately has the tendency to shoot her laser first before asking questions. But after EVE bonds with WALL·E’s pet cockroach, he is finally able to introduce himself to her and show Hello, Dolly! to her (from which he desperately gets a longing to hold hands just like Michael Crawford holds Marianne McAndrew’s).

After he placed fish into a touching father-son adventure in Finding Nemo, it does not come as a huge surprise that director Andrew Stanton, with his co-writer, Jim Reardon, effortlessly brings such tangible human emotions to these animated robotic beings so that the above story description can even be written. Just WALL·E’s eyes alone seem to carry all the emotions the character expresses from joy and awe to loneliness and tears. When EVE then enters the picture and he eventually turns her narrowing digital eyes to rounder, loving ones, forget all the recent, inane live-action romantic comedies you have seen. This film, with Thomas Newman’s subtly mesmerizing score and simply a series of electronic purrs and one-word dialogue exchanges between WALL·E and EVE (voiced by Ben Burtt and Elissa Knight, respectively), becomes one of the most delightful love stories I have seen in at least the last five years. I will certainly have to watch the movie again (and I will, maybe even with the sound off) to closely see all the crisp visual details that convince that WALL·E is a he and EVE is a beautiful-looking robot.

Amidst all this, through a series of complications that I will leave you to discover, a plot finally takes shape after WALL·E stows away on a rocket that lands on a gigantic spaceship inhabited by humans. We learn that Earth has been abandoned for 700 years and that the low-gravity atmosphere inside has turned people into fat and lazy beings who ride around in vehicles resembling large shopping carts, avoid any human contact and stare blankly at their monitors spoon-feeding information everyday. The ship’s captain (Jeff Garlin) is not even properly manning his ship because everything is being controlled by artificially intelligent robots. Everything changes, however, when the captain himself starts to relearn about this long-lost planet called Earth and WALL·E and EVE must aid him to revive the human race.

At this point, I realize that I have grown so enchanted with the story and the visual invention that I forgot to mention that this is supposed to be a family film, too. It is just that it is a family film made with the imagination of a true dreamer and the patience of a skilled storyteller. What is most ennobling is the way Stanton and the animators refuse to cater to the ADD-styled mindset of children these days and really challenge and engage the young viewers with bigger and even starker ideas. And the movie, besides being a moving love story between robots as aforementioned, presents a highly effective cautionary warning not only for children but also for adults on not letting the world reach the state where an apathetic consumerist culture has turned Earth into just a big dump site and the humans have become a slothful culture (although I guess the WALL·E tie-in toys will probably sell big time).

While digital animation has now become so commercially ingrained that the other studios have produced more mediocre efforts, the original innovators that are Pixar have continued to provide great family films that entertain children as well as adults into tapping into their own childhood selves. Then there was last year’s Ratatouille, which showed Pixar's curiosity to transcend the label of “a family film” and explore more mature themes. Now, by even following the great tradition of classical science fiction of creating fantastical worlds to comment on the human condition, WALL·E brings into focus what all the previous Pixar movies have hinted at within their stories and the animators' invention: that curiosity must remain an unalienable human trait because, without it, we will lose our ability to look beyond ourselves like WALL·E does.

The Visitor

“The Visitor”

USA. 2008. Written and directed by Thomas McCarthy. Starring: Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Jekesai Gurira, Hiam Abbass, Marian Seldes, Maggie Moore, Michael Cumpsty, Bill McHenry, Richard Kind, Tzahi Moskovitz, Amir Arison, Neal Lerner, Ramon Fernandez and Waleed Zuaiter.

Rating: ★★★★

Many may regard Thomas McCarthy’s The Visitor as a parable or even a humanistic fantasy but I would like to think that it is more than that. I want to believe that somewhere a buttoned-down, emotionally shut down scholar could re-awaken when he decides against merely throwing out two immigrants who have been illegally staying in his apartment that he has not lived in for years. Indeed, not only does he reawaken in the movie, he builds a friendship that becomes intimately close to familial.

That connection is all the power in the movie, which singularly paints a most humanistic face to a political problem. Much like he did in The Station Agent in which he soulfully tackled the issue of differences in interacting with a dwarf man, writer/director Thomas McCarthy, who reportedly devoted extensive personal research and friendship into the immigration experience, gives us rich, vivid characters who find profound camaraderie in unlikely situations – this time across cultures and nationalities rather than external physical stature. It is also about a man who blasts free of years of emotional and spiritual paralysis by embracing his capacity for generosity he thought lay dormant for so long.

The man is Walter Vale, who is played by Richard Jenkins in a remarkably understated performance that shows that perhaps he would have been a more ideal choice than Jack Nicholson to play the titular role in About Schmidt. He is a 62-year old, Connecticut College economics professor who teaches only one class and claims to be working on finishing his great novel though his sad, crinkled face and his aimless piano lessons suggest his life as a whole is going nowhere. In the beginning, he hardly seems to be open to any kindness, as he even refuses to hear the reason one of his students turned in a paper late.

One day, he travels to New York to present a paper he co-authored at a conference. He hasn’t been in his apartment there for 25 years and is stunned to find when he arrives at night that it has been illegally sublet to a Syrian immigrant, Tarek Khalil (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Jekesai Gurira). After a brief confrontation, the couple willingly agrees to leave immediately. Upon seeing a framed picture the couple left behind, he seeks them out and asks whether they have a place to stay.

Thus begins a friendship between Walter and Tarek, and McCarthy, as he did with The Station Agent, makes sure that he builds it patiently in the lowest and subtlest key. The turning point when they bond as Tarek teaches Walter to play the African drum could have been made soppy with needless gestures of “a-ha” realization but is handled with masterfully restrained direction with as little and simple dialogue as possible. Soon thereafter, in a scene that transitions from being gently humorous to genuinely affecting, Walter finds himself drumming alongside African immigrants in Central Park.

Right after though, the movie hits its thematic and emotional shift when Tarek is arrested in the subway in front of Walter and locked away in a detention center. It is here the film becomes more issue-oriented and, though it asks hard questions like how people like Tarek are whisked away to detention without a proper reading of rights or notice to family members, the story does not overdraw either the government officials and lawyers that Walter desperately seeks out as merely cold-hearted or the immigrants necessarily as unassuming victims. The movie’s sole focus is on showing the reverberating emotional and psychological costs of the unforgiving laws built in the wounding aftermath of 9/11.

Carrying through the heartfelt and heartbreaking traversals is Richard Jenkins who, with the slightest facial gestures, proves that he can hold the screen like a vice for a whole movie rather than just the select few scenes he usually does in so many films (look him up on IMDb to match his name and extensive filmography to his face). It is astonishing to think of the number of character actors whom we take for granted in building a convincing surrounding universe in the movies and it is a joy to watch Jenkins fill this flesh-and-blood character as a quietly towering emotional center. McCarthy, a character actor himself in numerous films, let Peter Dinklage do just that in The Station Agent and he just may guide Jenkins this time to a leading Oscar® nomination come next year.

The characters are all so perfectly cast that one can only admire how McCarthy and his casting directors, Kerry Barden, Stephane Foenkinos, Billy Hopkins and Suzanne Smith find such rich talent without looking for stardom. Sleiman, as Walter’s source of renewal of sorts, makes his inherent sense of joy infectious until he shares to grow the desperation that Gurira’s Zainab has feared all along. Another distinctive standout is Hiam Abbass (Paradise Now, The Nativity Story) as Tarek’s mother, Mouna who comes in the second half and adds another touching layer of companionship for Walter that McCarthy sensitively avoids overreaching or, more importantly, vulgarizing.

The Visitor is the kind of movie that I crave for more of because, right down to the choice of actors, it believes in a sense of goodness and humanity that society as a whole seems to frown upon. Perhaps it ironically makes sense that a man like Walter who has been cut off from the real world is so willing to rediscover the profound joy and heartbreak of a full-blooded friendship again. Someone who has been part of the world for so long might have been too jaded to be so gracious.

Atonement

“Atonement”

USA. 2007. Directed by Joe Wright. Screenplay by Christopher Hampton. Based on the novel by Ian McEwan. Starring: James McAvoy, Keira Knightley, Saoirse Ronan, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Blethyn, Juno Temple, Felix von Simson, Charlie von Simson and Alfie Allen.

Rating: ★★★★

Atonement tells the story of two lovers whose potential for luxurious bliss in 1930s Great Britain will be destroyed by a horrendous lie. The premise may sound like just another throwback to the historical epics of the 1940s but it is to the great and unique credit of the movie based on the rich novel by Ian McEwan that it places equal gravity to that third person who tells the lie that separates the two lovers. By the end, we will see all three of their lives left mired in despair and longing for missed opportunities caused by an act of spoiled immaturity.

The movie opens in a posh, rich mansion in London where we see the Tallis family daughters, Cecilia (Keira Knightley) and 13-year old, Briony (Saoirse Ronan) who bask under the shining sun in the summer of 1935. Cecilia tries to deny it but the attraction between her and Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the son of the housekeeper, Grace (Brenda Blethyn), is strong and irresistible. Briony, who is already gazed upon by her parents as a blossoming writer, has a crush on him, too, as she glimpses in jealousy and miscomprehension a romantic flirtation that builds between Cecilia and Robbie.

Then, one day, Briony walks in on Cecilia and Robbie in the throes of carnal passion in the library and misconstrues it as him attacking Cecilia after earlier intercepting a lewd letter that he mistakenly sent out as a love letter to her sister. Thus, later when she comes across the seeming rape of one of her cousins, Lola (Juno Temple), her seething envy and misperception of Robbie combine to compel her to falsely accuse Robbie of the crime despite that she never clearly saw the real perpetrator. This false testimony’s repercussions spill over into World War II after Robbie decides to serve in the military after four years in prison and is assigned as one of the British soldiers to fight in France.

The film directed by Joe Wright and adapted by Christopher Hampton makes the shrewd choice to stay faithful to the distinctive three-act storytelling structure of the original novel while enhancing it with some modern touches of filmmaking in a few scenes. Briony’s clear remove from the true grasp of the situation, for example, is magnified from the first act’s omniscient point of view in the novel by showing the two key moments – the flirtation at the fountain and the library tryst – first in her perspective and then at ground level with Cecilia and Robbie. The second act, set four years later, flips through different time points among Robbie’s struggle to stay alive and sane in the midst of the war, Cecilia’s efforts to keep her love alive with him by exchanging letters and the nurse training of Briony (now played by Romola Garai) who is guilt-ridden for her grave, childish mistake.

Some have criticized the film for not really exploiting the true scope of the war and not feeling as epic-scaled as it should but this tale is not about battle but about tangled destinies tilted toward inexorable tragedy. Thus, Wright presents how the hopelessness and bleakness of war affect Robbie’s psyche on a more intimate scale with an unbroken five-minute take that spans across the dreary preparation of the French infantrymen at the beach in Dunkirk. This virtuoso shot and other horrific aftermaths of carnage that Robbie and Briony witness are interspersed with a fleeting, heartbreaking meeting between the two lovers and a later crucial moment with the three characters together that contemplates the sumptuous joy that they have lost and whether there is room for familial atonement and forgiveness.

All of the actors are well-suited to the material but McAvoy stands out displaying the full arc of a young idealist whose hope for romance and a college education is crushed by forces beyond his control. Knightley’s usual staccato, clipped speech works well against his quiet, genteel nature that is reduced to sullen longing. It is also a good choice to have two different gifted actresses like Saoirse Roran and Romola Garai play the young tragic catalyst to respectively give a visual transition from the girl’s act of foolish resentment through the years that pass by before she finally feels remorse from knowing how callous and devastating it was.

The biggest question lingering in most people who have read the bestseller is how well the power of the final act would translate to the movie. This is where the performance by the veteran actress, Vanessa Redgrave is so crucial to illuminating all of the story’s ironies that lie between fiction and anecdote, imagination and reality. Within the irony, both the book and the movie explore the questions regarding the range and rationale for which art can truly imitate life when it is so tragic.

Such paradoxical intricacies are at the heart of Atonement and (though I thought his Pride and Prejudice was a little disappointing in translating Jane Austen) with this film, Wright shows himself as a master of faithful translation from lyrical words to poetic images. He knows he has a story with all the personal depth and empathy to reshape an old-fashioned tale and proves he has the cinematic language to reflect them on the screen. His mastery here lends itself to period filmmaking at its finest and most modern.

No Country for Old Men

“No Country for Old Men”

USA. 2007. Written for the screen and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harrelson, Kelly McDonald, Garret Dillahunt, Tess Harper, Barry Corbin, Stephen Root, Rodger Boyce and Beth Grant.

Rating: ★★★★

The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men opens with the weary, matter-of-fact narration of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) that tells the story of a 14-year old boy who killed a girl his age and was subsequently sent to the electric chair. Everyone thought it was a crime of passion but Bell says that the boy told him that he had planned on it all along, would kill again if he were still free and that he knew he was going straight to hell in about 15 minutes. He then laments how he cannot deal with the rising evil throughout his years on duty as a lawman and expresses how troubled and powerless he really feels against it.

This sets the stage for a chilling study of how ordinary people deal with the idea that some people are just innately, implacably evil. If the Coen brothers’ last great film, Fargo explored how a chirpy, sunny sheriff restored morality and order to a small town disrupted by a series of heartless crimes, this one peerlessly looks at a human being who has so far gone off the radar of morality that no amount of sound reason can be spoken into him. The film's villain, a peculiar and ruthlessly efficient hitman named Anton Chigurrh (Javier Bardem) is a person like that.

The man that sets him and this intricate story off is Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a southwest Texan cowboy who one day stumbles on a drug deal gone horribly wrong with a lot of dead bodies left behind. He investigates and soon finds a suitcase filled with $2 million in cash. Instead of turning it over to the police, however, he sees opportunity in the money to live a better life than the one he currently lives with his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly McDonald) in a trailer park. So he takes the money and runs.

Taking the money is easy enough but Moss, responding to his own conscience, goes back to the scene to give water to a man he saw alive earlier at the scene and asked for it. That turns out to be a near fatal mistake when his vehicle is discovered by some unseen thugs and he barely escapes. Now there are a number of bad men who want him dead, including, of course, Chigurrh, who carries a pneumatic cattle stun-gun with a compressed tank of air to kill people. And there’s Sheriff Bell who follows Chigurrh’s murderous trail and wants to help Moss before he becomes too greedy and stubborn to realize what kind of remorseless, psychopathic killer is after him.

That is enough of the plot; the surprises should unfurl on their own. Needless to say, the Coen brothers have found the perfect literary material in author Cormac McCarthy’s bestseller to adapt to their filmmaking style. They are no stranger to examining the best laid criminal plans going horribly astray and being nearly lockstep faithful to the novel provided no hurdles for them to do some of their best filmmaking (although a slight flaw in the novel’s ending carries over into the film and is a little more magnified). In being faithful, they have also stripped away the typical quirky humor common within their previous works, creating their most unblinking portrait of the cold savagery of man.

The dialogue filtered by the Coens from the novel is stunningly eloquent. One exchange is particularly striking when Chigurrh talks to a passing convenience store clerk. This scene just builds and builds as the clerk realizes what minuscule misunderstandings can anger this psychopathic killer, ultimately leading the clerk to slowly fear for his own life. Finally, it comes to a moment when Chigurrh tells the clerk to call the result of a coin toss without telling him what is at stake.

Much praise must also go to Javier Bardem who almost unrecognizably disappears into this most vicious and unsavory character. The classic movie villains have the quality of giving audiences chills at the thought of their lurking presence and Bardem has that, too, with a chipped accent, a wrinkled, dead-eyed, glaring stare and an impassively modulated gait. He is like a human terminator: the kind of killer that cannot be bargained with or reasoned with, only that he is scarier because he is fully flesh-and-blood.

All the other actors deliver equally measured performances that expand and enrich the character personae they are best known for. Many will say that Tommy Lee Jones is playing yet another pursuer role but what makes his character fresh here is how the dogged determination of his previous similar roles has been replaced by downtrodden weariness. Also, there are very few actors who can match his delivery of laconic pain (as he showed in his great performance in the earlier In the Valley of Elah). Meanwhile, Josh Brolin, who often plays rugged, cocky characters, does some of his best work by projecting great vulnerability into his obstinate cowboy role to make us root for him despite his flaws and that he is too foolish at times to realize how unfairly matched he may be against Chigurrh.

All the technical credits from Roger Deakins’ cinematography to the Coens’ editing (under the pseudonym, Roderick Jaynes) are also masterful but one aspect I want to emphasize is a criminally underrated aspect of filmmaking – sound design. There are brilliant moments in the cat-and-mouse chase between Chigurrh and Moss that rely on deep silences punctuated by tiny creaks of a lurking menace or the unscrewing of a grate. And observe the sound of a wrapper that uncurls after Chigurrh has crumpled it so tightly in his fist. So exquisitely are the aural effects timed by sound editor Skip Lievsay that sound almost becomes like the bomb that Hitchcock said does not go off to build dread and suspense.

It is often said that evil men lack all sense of emotion in addition to values. No Country for Old Men conversely shows that emotion is the very part that evil lends itself the least comprehension to an ordinary person. People may figure out a way to face up to it or simply resort to their survivalist natures but they have no idea how the resultant feelings will fundamentally change them, just like Bell doesn’t know.

Lars and the Real Girl

“Lars and the Real Girl”

USA. 2007. Directed by Craig Gillespie. Written by Nancy Oliver. Starring: Ryan Gosling, Emily Mortimer, Paul Schneider, Kelli Garner, Patricia Clarkson, R.D. Reid, Nancy Beatty, Doug Lennox, Joe Bostick, Liz Gordon, Nicky Guadagni, Karen Robinson, Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, Billy Parrott and Sally Cahill.

Rating: ★★★★

The first important thing to make clear about Lars and the Real Girl is that it is about as much about life-size love dolls as Signs was about aliens. Many people will fear the repellent or laughable pratfalls this tale about a lonely man who introduces a female doll as his girlfriend could fall into (no less because the director Craig Gillespie previously helmed the crass and dreadful comedy, Mr. Woodcock). But Gillespie, who now announces himself as a fresh new talent to watch for, and first-time writer Nancy Oliver are too smart and too sensitive to vulgarize their innocent story and its immensely sympathetic and likable protagonist.

The second and more crucial thing to note is that the film’s unassuming, resolutely innocent quality turns this into one of the most poignant portraits of loneliness I’ve ever seen. Rarely has a film so touchingly treated loneliness and diffidence not as clinical symptoms to be fixed but as conditions that can be nursed and amended with unconditional love and acceptance. And the uncompromising and quietly ambitious way the movie presents this heartfelt and honest insight within its unusual story and characters is almost beyond description.

The film stars Ryan Gosling in yet another brilliant performance as Lars Lindstrom. He lives next door to his brother, Gus (Paul Schneider) and sister-in-law, Karin (Emily Mortimer). The struggle for Gus and Karin is that Lars so stubbornly keeps to himself. He drives to work solemnly, silently goes inside his house alone every night, attends church alone every Sunday and barely associates with either of them. He even refuses to come over for dinner despite Karin’s repeated pleadings, which he eventually does only because the pregnant Karin actually tackles him to the ground urging him to do so. And of course, he consistently resists the advances of Margo (Kelli Garner), a co-worker who has taken a liking to him.

One day, however, Lars announces that he has a girlfriend he met on the Internet. Of course, the girlfriend named Bianca is really a life-size love doll, much to the shock of Gus and Karin. No, she is not used for sex (he asks that Bianca have a separate bedroom in Gus' house because he is a devout Christian) but is really more of an imaginary companion for Lars. Gus can’t stand to bear the fact that his brother may be completely insane. But Karin somehow sees this as a unique stepping stone for him since he had never before so willingly communicated with them at all. The local doctor, Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson) agrees that accepting Bianca just like a real person may invaluably help Lars break out of his shell.

What elevates the story into the realm of a Capra-esque fable is how the people of his small town decide to go along with treating Bianca like a real person, too. Sure, they make some obvious small chuckles and snickers, which generate some big laughs in the beginning. But when the townspeople band together to care for Lars – after one of the unanimously churchgoing townspeople rhetorically asks, “What would Jesus do?” – we know that the film’s values are pure and will avoid any easy shots at smuttiness.

It goes without saying that Lars harbors some deep-seated pain inside and his counseling visits with Dagmar (in the guise of the latter nursing Bianca’s health) provide some of the best scenes in the film. A lesser movie would have resorted to some cheap flashbacks and psychoanalytic babble but the screenplay wisely focuses on how to deal with Lars’ issue of loneliness in the present instead of trying to explain away the past. That Dagmar and everyone else are able to project the pathos that Lars needs to heal entirely through Bianca makes it all the more subtly remarkable. And there is a transcendently sweet scene involving a teddy bear that I must not reveal because it should make your heart leap up as it did mine.

At the center, of course, is Gosling who just keeps on topping himself in his range and caliber of performances. All the characters he has played including a neo-Nazi, a district attorney, an inner-city school teacher addicted to drugs and now a shy and lonely young man have nothing in common other than the fact that they are so meticulously inhabited. Here, watching his complete command of tone between quiet humor and genuine sympathy, we almost get the sense he is creating this most unique character out of thin air (not to mention making Bianca into a symbolic character we actually care about).

The movie must have been a difficult high-wire act for Gillespie and Oliver. They, of course, supply the humorous reaction shots to touch on our instinctive responses to the sight of a life-size mannequin. But they sidestep any temptation for mockery and maintain complete sincerity as their fulcrum to successfully cross the tightrope between drama and light comedy, idealism and yes, even plausibility.

Lars and the Real Girl is easily one of the best films of the year and can only be called uncompromisingly moving. It is hard to describe in words the amount of courage and chances it takes to singularly bring out our capacity to express empathy and understanding. And in a world where some people are ostracized for being different or misunderstood, a movie like this is a warm antidote.

The Shawshank Redemption

“The Shawshank Redemption”

USA. 1994. Directed by Frank Darabont. Screenplay by Frank Darabont. Based on the short story, “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” by Stephen King. Starring: Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, William Sadler, Clancy Brown, Gil Bellows, Mark Rolston and James Whitmore.

Rating: ★★★★

The most distinguishing quality of Frank Darabont’s masterful The Shawshank Redemption is its patience, in its storytelling and the time the filmmakers waited to earn the deserved acclaim it has. Rarely has a film necessitated such deep reflection beneath the surface and rarely has a film made the depths so rewarding.

Many people have duly praised the film as a moving story of hope or a deep spiritual experience and that it may be. But it strikes a stronger chord than other films of its kind because it not just about hope restored but also the progress of truly believing in it. It is also about an even more meaningful subject seldom portrayed so vividly in the movies – salvation.

The key to understanding both of these themes is in the structure of this movie set in prison. Despite that the hero is Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), he is not the center of the film. That is Red Redding (Morgan Freeman), a fellow lifer who is the narrator of the story, and it is through Red's eyes that we see the core positive values the hero represents. It is thus a journey of discovery and redemption and not merely a simplistic success story.

When Red first sees Andy arrive in Shawshank prison, he says that he “looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over.” He even bets with the other prisoners that he won’t be able to last through his first night in prison. But when he really meets him, his observations have already changed to admiration: “It’s like he had some invisible coat on to shield him from the rest.”

And so he is, despite that things are not easy for Andy at first. He has been imprisoned despite his maintaining his innocence of murdering his wife and her lover. In the first few years of his stay, he is beaten and sexually assaulted by other prisoners throughout his first few years (which the movie avoids exploiting and tactfully implies by just briefly showing his bruises at medium-length). Yet he does not break down, solemnly reads his Bible in his cell and confidently walks by himself. And when he finally breaks out of his shell, he becomes something of a do-gooder and a Christ-like figure, bringing inspiration to his fellow inmates, as in the unforgettable moment when he plays The Marriage of Figaro over the prison radio.

Red, on the other hand, is like all the other lifers, disenchanted and disillusioned by the entrapment of the four walls around him. That’s why he wonders, as we do, about this most unconventional inmate who seems unaffected and undisturbed by the environs around him. Who is this Good Samaritan who struts in the prison yard with a tiny smile on his face while the others are merely slogging through?

Red, whose character serves as the story’s markers as we see the progression of his term through parole hearings at 20, 30 and 40 years, is initially not a believer of hope. When Andy states that hope is something inside that cannot be touched, Red flatly replies, “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.” And as the latter observes the seemingly insurmountable amount of hardship Andy has to endure, he seems to be right. This is particularly true when Andy is unjustly persecuted by the churchgoing warden who is not willing to let go of the help that he has offered (again paralleling the Pharisees in the Bible who mocked Jesus Christ).

But Andy endures and perseveres because he knows who he is and the movie has the uncanny quality to rescue hope from the deepest bowels of despair. Any plot description would make the film sound like a depressing experience but the story is all the more uplifting because of the spectrum through which optimism is brought into the limelight. And as Red slowly comes to understand the values Andy says and then acts on, his own soul finds the freedom to seek hope and meaning from within.

Because this story is so flawlessly told like an unhurried, engrossing novel, it is easy to ignore the impressive artistic quality behind and that is one measure of a true masterpiece. All of the incredible performances by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, the masterful writing and direction by Frank Darabont, the eye-popping cinematography by Roger Deakins and the moving score by Thomas Newman combine to create a vision that creates such a satisfying whole that it is hard to distinguish among the technical credits of excellence. All of this builds to arguably the most uplifting ending in cinematic history, which I won’t reveal for those who have still yet to discover the film.

There have been numerous uplifting, inspirational films in recent years but The Shawshank Redemption speaks volumes more than any of them. That is because it touches on our need to not just believe that hope is real and can survive but that there is someone who is a living example of it. Andy knows that, Red eventually sees it and The Shawshank Redemption is a searing portrait of that unspoken need.