Rian Johnson’s comedy about a pair of brilliant Jewish con artists with one last great scam up their sleeves is a charming fairytale about fiction itself. Mark Ruffalo’s elaborate stings are so beautifully conceived that it is difficult to know where real life ends and make-believe begins. Stephen (Ruffalo) maps out every crooked scenario like a romantic story. He paints the exotic scenery – St Petersburg, Prague, New Jersey, Mexico, Montenegro – and fleshes out the elegant parts that each brother plays to psychological perfection.

In one of the first scenes we see his 35-year-old younger brother, Bloom (played by Adrien Brody), taking a fake bullet in the chest from an emotional “mark” (victim) who doesn’t realise just how neatly he has been set up. The irony is that Bloom feels imprisoned by Stephen’s ingenious deceptions. His personality feels as if it is a figment of his brother’s imagination. Bloom aches for the uncertain freedom of “an unwritten life” – a future that hasn’t been scripted by his witty, flamboyant brother. The existential comedy lies in just how impossible this is for Brody’s fearful hero. No matter where he runs, he cannot escape his genial brother or their mute oriental sidekick, Bang Bang (Rinko Kikuchi), whose fondness for nitroglycerine punctuates the story.

continue reading »

Bottom Line: Superbly acted, deeply authentic portrait of the lives of two petty thieves in South Boston.
By Peter Brunette

TORONTO — We’ve all seen this film before — two hoodlum friends from the tough, violent streets of South Boston trying to cope with the lure of easy money and the offsetting threat of jail time — but we’ve never seen it this well done.

With Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke registering personal bests in the performance category as well as playing magnificently and ultraconvincingly off each other, “What Doesn’t Kill You,” a true story that is powerful and completely riveting from beginning to end, clearly is one of the best films at Toronto this year.

The independent film recently was bought by Image Entertainment and should do well in limited commercial engagements. Festival programrs should definitely have a look, and ancillary sales, especially DVD, should be robust.

continue reading »

Reed Johnson to The Sydney Morning Herald

MARK RUFFALO and Julianne Moore are traipsing through a rubbish-strewn urban wasteland, scavenging for salvation. All around them, dozens of pitiful humans dressed in filthy, mismatched clothes grope their way past wrecked cars and graffiti-splattered highway ramps, like dancers in some grotesque ballet of the damned.

It is not a pretty sight, but it is impossible to avert your eyes – which is exactly the point. The director, Fernando Meirelles, and his camera crew are gearing up to shoot another take of Blindness, a feature film based on the harrowing 1995 parable about an unnamed city stricken with a plague of sightlessness, by the Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago. Like nearly everyone in the film, Ruffalo’s character, an ophthalmologist known simply as “the doctor”, is afflicted with a terrifying malady in which the eyes appear normal but are coated with a milky whiteness that blocks out vision.

continue reading »

Review By: Mark Zimmer
Published: January 07, 2008

On occasion a criminal captures the imagination in a particularly emphatic way; Jack the Ripper did so both through extreme violence and a series of taunting letters to the police and press. The California serial killer who called himself The Zodiac followed in those footsteps, killing five confirmed victims in 1968 and 1969 (though claiming many more in his letters) and sending a lengthy correspondence, filled with puzzles and ciphers, vague threats and displaying an odd fondness for Gilbert & Sullivan musicals. Although never caught, his talent for branding and media manipulation have given him an importance in true crime lore that has few equals.

David Fincher’s film begins with several of the murders, though including only the ones that had surviving witnesses. While graphically depicted, they occur very quickly and it’s clear that Fincher’s interest lies not with Zodiac or the killings, but specifically with the effect that his conduct and especially his letters had upon three men. These include San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.), who did the principal coverage on the case, and detective Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the lead investigator for the San Francisco police. Most importantly, it centers on Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), a cartoonist for the Chronicle who becomes completely obsessed with the case, and eventually would write the book that started a generation of armchair detectives on the case, referred to affectionately or contemptuously in equal measure as the Yellow Book.

continue reading »

Is there anything more depressing than the senseless death of a child? In the real world, perhaps not; in Reservation Road, plenty. For starters, it’s depressing to note that director Terry George elected to follow his powerful Hotel Rwanda with this simple-minded melodrama. It’s also depressing to note that this film largely wastes the talents of not one but two Best Supporting Actress Oscar winners, Jennifer Connelly and Mira Sorvino. And finally, it’s depressing when a strong premise is compromised by lazy plotting and cop-out resolutions. Based on John Burnham Schwartz’s novel (with Schwartz co-writing the screenplay with George), Reservation Road starts with a young boy being struck and killed by an SUV.

continue reading »

“Reservation Road” falls victim to a common affliction of parallel-action narratives: One story is far more meaningful and emotionally affecting than the other. Director Terry George’s latest film is about how grief, guilt and introspection emerge in two men involved in a fatal accident. It tries to mix an intensely internalized Mark Ruffalo performance with Joaquin Phoenix’s scenes, which descend into a contrived haze of investigatory paranoia. It’s a character drama mistakenly reworked as a tense thriller.