Rating:
Director: Michael Mann
Starring: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Marion Cotillard, Billy Crudup

Public Enemies is a well-drawn period drama, a look at America’s historic love affair with the colorful gangsters of the Depression era without celebrating them. Johnny Depp, a master at playing outsiders, gives us a John Dillinger who’s both a driven, aggressive man and one who’s realizing that he has no future.

Director Michael Mann opens the film with an audacious jailbreak that quickly establishes the world of the film. Dillinger is decisive, bold, violent — but he’s contrasted with a crook who lacks discipline and shows wanton cruelty. We don’t get a hero in Dillinger, but he’s a cut above the likes of Baby Face Nelson, who later in the film is willing to mow down bystanders and cops for no good reason.

Depp gives us a main character that we’re willing to watch and even root for (though history had written Dillinger’s fate before the screenwriters were born), without making him a hero, or soft-pedaling the man’s violent side. One viewer might feel sorry for Dillinger in the end, and another might think he deserved exactly what he got. Hell, you might think both.

Rating:
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Catherine O’Hara

This is a really good movie. It’s touching, it’s funny, and it takes universal themes and some familiar ideas but makes them feel fresh and original, at the same time catching a certain surreal feeling in its characters’ lives. There should be more movies this good.

Rating:
Director: Sam Raimi
Starring: Alison Lohman, Justin Long

We love rollercoasters because they surprise and thrill us in a way that, while largely based on startling us, is also based on familiarity—you know how the roller coaster will surprise you. There’s going way up, going way down, jerking one way or another, and the whole corkscrew thing. That’s really all there is. But each new roller coaster recombines the simple elements, and throws them at us (more accurately, throws us at them) with so much speed that all we can do is surrender to the ride, laugh and scream at the silly wild thrill of it, and then stagger to our feet when it’s over.

So, that’s Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell and it’s freakin’ awesome. Go see it.

Rating:
Director: J.J. Abrams
Starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Zoe Saldana, Eric Bana

Star Trek is two hours of breathless awesome.

Director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman took a very quirky, more-than-slightly ridiculous old show that has a rabid fan base and a main character who is a staple of comedy club impressionists everywhere, a show that wore its soaring New Frontier heart on its velour sleeve and can only seem sillier as we (the cultural We) become more cynical and mundane. Seriously, to do adoring justice to that source material while still creating a frenetic special-effects film that will appeal to the Iron Man/Dark Knight/Transformers/James Bond crowd of modern thrill junkies is a pretty good description of a thankless and impossible task. What the fans would call a Kobayashi Maru scenario, a no-win situation.

This movie is chock full of win.

Rating:
Directors: Alastair Fothergill, Mark Linfield
Starring: Lions, Elephants & Polar Bears, oh my!

Here’s a fact: If you’re going to make a documentary called Earth and fit it into a ninety-minute run time, you are doomed to failure. Big topic, “Earth.” Even if you’re sticking to the natural world, and even if your main goal were to fetishize waterfalls and cute baby animals, you’re still never gonna produce a ninety-minute film worthy of being called … Earth.

The first film to be released by the new DisneyNature label (timed to Earth Day!) is in fact a two-year-old BBC-funded documentary that was produced in parallel with Planet Earth, a series whose total ten-hour runtime sounds a little better-suited to covering the subject. Knowing this somehow makes one more forgiving of the flaws of the cinematic release. Earth feels like a poorly assembled hodgepodge of brilliant footage whose glory is nearly lost beneath weak storytelling (and a truly crap score). Imagining the filmmakers having to cut the 600 broadcast minutes they’d already culled from thousands of hours of video to get this hour and a half at least makes you appreciate how stacked against them the deck was.