On Screen

...When gang members assault the youth next door, Walt grabs his rifle and orders them off the property...

...Brad Pitt, born an old man, grows younger as time goes on...

...Some have called the film a pyrotechnic fairy tale...

...Benjamin Button has a lot in common with Slumdog, and rings just as false...

...Pitt and Blanchett try to register as people, but are stifled by the multitude of "looks" the film forces them to adopt...

...Its imitation of contempo - rary Indian filmmaking falls flat...

...A Korean War veteran, he has developed a colorfully obnoxious arsenal of racial epithets that he frequently fires at Asians, blacks and Jews...

...boy and girl get back together again...

...Thus, while the climax of Frost/Nixon is diverting, the film never develops either of its main characters sufficiently to justify their sharp transformations...

...A widescreen filmfilledwithcloseups, shallowfocus, and a lazily moving camera, Frost/Nixon is as stylistically off-kilter as the inverted importance it attaches to its subject matter...

...Except forthe limp sequence underthe closing titles, Slumdog Millionaire has none of these...

...I am reluctant to use Eastwood as a stick to beat the rest of the year's movies, but many that have garnered more critical acclaim than Gran Torino pale by comparison...

...Frost/Nixon, The Reader, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, and Milk—along with potential contenders like Changeling, Valkyrie, and Revolutionary Road—banked on the myth that time capsules are destined to become cinematic classics...

...Where did David Frost find the sudden ability to pin his subject to the wall...

...I attribute Slumdog Millionaire's success to its careful marketing...

...He becomes their defender in the face of ongoing harassment...

...Director Bryan Singer {X-Men, Apt Pupil) has a penchant for using the Holocaust as a canvas for potboilers...

...Despite his crassness, he maintains a startling integrity...

...In the first, a café worker in Mumbai goes all the way on the Indian version of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, winning 20 million rupees...

...Though he will turn79 this year, he is now in the most prolific and assured phase of his professional life...

...One of this winter's pictures that sweeps across time does remain memorable...

...Instead director Danny Boyle deploys blurry shots and rapid editing that disrupt continuity, all intended to announce the presence of the filmmaker while setting us apart from anything but the most surface relation to the three main characters...

...Released inDecember, it was just the present we needed to make our holiday season complete...

...It is a cynical one at best, touching on the stinking streets of Mumbai, the prejudices of the class system, the evils of child slavery, and the corruption of celebrity culture without saying anything particularly interesting about them...

...Eastwood who alternated between commercial and personal proj ects for most of his career, completed the transition later than anyone in the history of world cinema...

...His harsh, shallow breaths, the forced movements of his arms and legs, the agonized tension in his voice, the wince for which the actor is famous—all these elements highlight the physical trials of his dayto-day life and lead us to admire a man struggling to keep house as he did in his youth...

...The faults of Gran Torino are redeemed by the vivid characterizations at its center, its bracing plot, and its social relevance...

...Walt stands out in this crowd not only because he is a white man in a part of town populated mostly by Asians and African Americans, but also because he is angrier and more stubborn than anyone else...

...The film's frank portrait of gay men's lifestyles serves as an antidote to the priggish Brokeback Mountain...

...As Walt grows to love the family next door, the film demands that we forgive and even enjoy the loathsome verbiage that defines his character...

...boy loses girl...

...His neighbors fill him with even greater disgust...

...In this environment, it is no wonder that Eastwood's Changeling, released earlier last year, was funded on a grand scale while Gran Torino was shot on a shoestring...

...This is not surprising, for while the others go down rather easily, Gran Torino is tough and contemplative, a movie that’s easy to love yet hard to like...

...Walt, in a bitter state of mourning, living without sympathy, disdains his relatives...

...Some directors turn out fluff foratime and thenbecome serious...

...The former took place over many years during the Great Depression as a woman suffered the loss of her kidnapped son...

...Although Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski maintains guarded friendships with a few acquaintances and is burdened by occasional visits from his relatives, most of the secondary characters can be divided into two groups: the sheeplike denizens of his block and the snarling members of the street gangs who antagonize them...

...Even though Gran Torino should trouble anyone with liberal sensibilities, it is a work of art...

...Touching on almost every decade from the teens to today, Benjamin Button does not pause long enough to give us more than a clichéd vision of any one of them...

...In his later works such acts have come under increasingly tortured scrutiny...

...It takes place in a working-class neighborhood in the upper Midwest, but aside from the two leads it is populated by types rather than people...

...Revolutionary Road is somewhat reminiscent of IngmarBergman'sScewes/ww a Marriage...

...But Walt himself has much in common with the heroes of Eastwood's earlier directorial turns, and he also reflects some fascinating developments...

...Gran Torino's conclusion is a dazzling variation on this idea, turning the brutality of the antagonists against them...

...This trifle of an idea is borrowed from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald but director David Fincher and screenwriter Eric Roth plump it into a three-hour epic that borrows more from Roth's screenplay for Forrest Gump than it does from the original source...

...Naturally, it garnered several Oscar nominations...

...An Indian film made by a British director who never visited the country until he began preparing for his shoot, it is as authentic as blackface...

...In the long run, the films of 2008 that audiences will return to will be those that featured powerful and endearing personas...

...Screenwriter Nick Schenk has gone out of his way to fill Eastwood’s mouth with offensive language...

...Beginning with the underrated Blood Work in 2002, he has made seven movies in seven years, all of them entertaining and moody attempts to capture serious themes...

...They become lovers, but separate as his youth blooms and hers fades...

...Watching Pitt grow more youthful as Blanchett ages lends new meaning to the old saw about watching paint dry...

...At bottom, the story is as predictable as can be: Boy meets girl...

...Earlier Eastwood films had less cardboard in the margins...

...Almost plotless, it relies on a premise that is never developed...

...Refusing to focus on any single dramatic situation, they skim the surfaces of the personalities and the history they pretend to engage...

...he worst offenders are two of M the most honored films of the winter, SlumdogMillionaire, which won Best Picture, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...

...I cannot think of a recent American movie that so movingly and so accurately captures the difficulties of growing old in a country with no interest in the elderly...

...A true Bollywood movie would be filled with colorfully choreographed musical numbers expressing its characters' inner desires...

...Eastwood like the prolific filmmakers of an earlier generation, has been working with the same company of techniciansfordecades...

...It too concerns lovers who are separated for stretches of time, and never rests long enough in one spot to generate interest in them...

...The resultisfilm after film that simply reiterates its premises fortwo hours ormore...

...Observing their respect for the aged and their love for one another, he acknowledges that he has more in common with them than he does with his blood relations...

...Why does Richard Nixon, who stonewalls for most of the picture, abruptly decide it is time to confess his failings to the American people...

...When television officials interrogate him, insisting that he must have cheated he explains that eachofthe questions put to him relate to an important event in his life...

...On Screen The Test of Time By Raphael Shargel EVERY YEAR two indicators alert moviegoers that Hollywood has entered awards season: The temperature drops and big-budget films are set in the past...

...Snippets of conjugal dissolution over a 10year period deflect our sympathy for the couple as well as our understanding of their self-destructive choices...

...Walt bonds with his immediate neighbors because they are the only people in his world who do not see him as a hasbeen...

...Despite the verdict of the Academy Awards, I think movies like Gran Torino and Milk, along with other intriguing character studies like Doubt and Happy Go Lucky (and to a lesser extent, The Wrestler) will survive the test of time more successfully than those that traded emphasis on narrative for a flash-in-thepan dazzle...

...If the Biblical symbolism of the climax seems a little contrived the rest of Gran Torino is filmed with beautiful restraint...

...Here is an "art" film that's easy to take, a hightech Pretty Woman done in a country we ought to care about...

...Beginning with 1973's High Plains Drifter and periodically thereafter, Eastwood has explored the Western motif of the stranger who comes to a town ruled by violence, rains justified destruction upon its evildoers, then departs for the wilderness...

...His children and grandchildren, who at the start of the picture drive in from a more affluent district to attend his wife’s funeral, are clichés of ingratitude, more interested in their cars and iPods than in him...

...Valkyrie is so busy carving out chunks of time in its tale of German soldiers who plot to kill Hitler that it fails to explain their motivation...

...And all the Academy Aw ard nominations for Best Picture of 2008 went to films that professed to sweep through history...

...And in case we forget important moments, Boyle repeatedly reruns them...

...Yet despite its fine "period" production design and elegantly spare dialogue, the film fails to make the two most striking aspects of the novel credible: the protagonist's frightening detachment from the events he experiences, and his lover's decision to admit having committed war crimes ratherthanconfess that she is illiterate...

...Cate Blanchett ages normally...

...The hand-held camera and Boyle's tendency to place the action behind barriers that obscure it from our eyes, the games with color, film stock, and shutter speed render the film a passive experience...

...It is all very neat, and very smug, like a first script that might be churned out in a screenwriting class...

...The majority of today's prominent directors would have us believe that the differencebetweenpop and art films has less to do with subject matter and its treatment than with a brooding tone and a historical setting...

...In Valkyrie, however, Singer offers a tale of heroic Nazis, none of whom everutters the word "Jew...

...This winter, the industry floated a raft of melodramas with loads of “historical background” to tinsel their conventionality...

...Director Ron Howard who with Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man has proven himself unable to delve into American history without telling a conventional success story, concentrates too much of his energy on Frost's efforts to return to the limelight of celebrity...

...They have a tendency as well to flit from moment to moment over a period of years...

...Working-class neighborhoods have all but vanished from American cinema, but Eastwood lets the camera, rather than the script, tell the story of a community in decay and the genial spirits with the potential to save it...

...Shot on a relatively low budget over a month's time, Gran Torino has almost no extraneous details...

...Set in the present and elapsing over a relatively short span of time, the film was shut out of the Oscar game...

...Although more beautiful to watch and more entertaining than the Best Picture contenders, the actors seem adrift in the sea of time, chocked into stereotype by their costumes...

...The "prestige" films of the winter eschew these elements in favor of setting a mood...

...Audiences have become the victims of "pitch" conferences, where screenwriters must explain their ideas to producers in just a few minutes...

...So long as today's critics and audiences surrender themselves to the tone and feel of films that bank on such limited expectations, most pictures marketed as moving experiences will continue to be tedious...

...The ensemble casts in pictures from The Outlaw Josey Wales to Letters from Iwo Jima showed a depth lacking here...

...The Reader, which, like RevolutionaryRoad, stars Best Actress winner Kate Winslet, preserves the decades-long narrative of Bernhard Schlink's stark and haunting novel...

...The film takes place over a period of more than a decade, but the world it is set in seems static...

...He makes us respect the main figure even as we see his prickly nature and sometimes foolish choices...

...Its kinder, gentler treatment of characters whom Schlink roughhews sacrifices the power of the story on the altar of historical fidelity...

...Milk follows several years in the life of San Francisco activist Harvey Milk: his move to the Castro district, his election to the City Council, and his assassination in 1978...

...Eastwood is too politically conservative ever to portray as misguided a hero's radical individualism and final decision to remove himself, but the shootout and departure at the end of Unfot-given, the murder at the climax ofMystic River, and the killing that closes Million Dollar Baby ask us to agonize over the fate of the isolated vigilante...

...As they watch a video of the show, we flashback to the events that triggered his answers and conveniently follow his story in chronological order, particularly his pursuit of his lifelong sweetheart...

...After initially rebuffing offers of thanks, he befriends the boy’s sister (the wonderful Ahney Her), the only other three-dimensional character in the film...

...Most of Fincher's aesthetic energy is devoted to games with prosthetic makeup...

...Walt is one of Eastwood’s finest creations...

...The exception that proves the folly of this rule is Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino, a five-course meal compared to the thin gruel of the nominees and alsorans...

...Frank Langella puffs beautifully as the disgraced commander in chief, but he is let down by a script that dashes recklessly from 1972 to 1977, sidelining intricacies to relate its version of The Little Engine That Could...

...It is also an effective character study, largely because of Sean Penn's marvelous Oscar-winning performance...

...In one swoop, Walt's solution demonstrates both the extent of his commitment to defend his adopted family and the near impossibility of endingthe cycle of hostile retribution that grips inner cities today...

...But where Bergman offered six such scenes, director SamMendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe, adapting Richard Yates' novel, give us 60...