While much has been said about Catherine Hardwicke’s direction of the original film, she understood that The Twilight Saga is an unapologetic soap opera — an epic treatise on the joys and sorrows of true love. New Moon director Chris Weitz got the message, as well. There are villains, of course, but they come in a distant second to the tortured souls of Bella and Edward. At one point, Bella begs Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) — werewolf, best friend, and almost-rebound boyfriend — not to ask her to choose between him and Edward, because Edward will always win. Weitz didn’t ask his audience to choose between plot and Edward, because Edward had already won.

It was the right decision; after all, a film like New Moon would never withstand a director that took the plot as seriously as its central characters take themselves. With that said, however, it’s Taylor Lautner in the role of newbie werewolf Jacob Black who steals the show, often without the aid of a shirt. The Twilight Saga might be all about Bella and Edward, but Weitz appears firmly in the “Team Jacob” camp. While Jacob has torment of his own to contend with, he does so, for the most part, with dignity and a sense of humor. When Bella rejects him, you don’t get the sense that he’ll hightail it to Europe to commit suicide.

This, in a sledgehammer-lite shout-out to Romeo and Juliet, is exactly what Edward does after he mistakenly comes to believe that Bella has been killed. His plan — really — is to sparkle in public and provoke the wrath of the powerful elite group of vampire royalty known as the Volturi, whose strongest conviction is keeping humans unaware of their existence. Thankfully for our heroes, Shakespearean tragedy is avoided; instead, Michael Sheen, in a joyfully campy performance, spares their lives on the condition that Bella be changed into a vampire. Edward reluctantly agrees, but he has a condition of his own — without giving too much away, it’s a proposal that elicits a collective swoon from “Twi-hards” worldwide.

While The Twilight Saga should never, in any circumstances, set an example for any teen (human, vampire, or werewolf) in search of relationship advice, its viscerally felt melodrama coupled with uniformly strong performances makes for a very faithful adaptation of New Moon — and a more than worthy follow-up to Twilight.

The film opens on the titular Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney), a charming rake of a woodland creature with a penchant for devilish adventure, usually involving chicken theft. He and his wife (Meryl Streep) are engaging in just this kind of youthful mischief one day, when Fox’s usual cleverness momentarily fails and the two find themselves caught in a trap. Newly pregnant with their son, Mrs. Fox makes her husband swear that if they make it out alive, he’ll never engage in these kinds of dangerous antics ever again.

Fast forward to 12 years later, and Mr. Fox has a safe, modest job writing a column for the local paper. He’s got a happy, simple life, but things could be better. His son, Ash (Jason Schwartzman), is a bit on the small, timid, unathletic side, and the only home Mr. Fox can afford upgrading to just happens to overlook the backyards of three ultra-mean farmers. But, of course, for a magnanimous rascal like Fox, any minor hindrance can be turned to his advantage, and after settling into his new place, he uses his proximity to the three facilities to pull off one last heist…at each farm. That’s all well and good until the farmers catch on, and Fox and his neighbors are forced to band together in a stand-off against the tyrants.

Though Anderson’s past films have clearly shown his aptitude for just this kind of storybook style — full of maps and illustrations and cross sections — his stories have also historically been built around sometimes darker ideas about human relationships. But, rest assured, that kind of angsty cynicism doesn’t creep its way into Fantastic Mr. Fox at all. Though Anderson’s trademark deadpan banter and clever silliness are in full force (helped, no doubt, by a choice to record the cast live, together, and on location — as opposed to in a studio), the script is no less sophisticated than anything out of the filmmaker’s catalogue, and there isn’t even a trace of bellicose self-indulgence; he’s not taking the opportunity to work out issues with his childhood, though he probably could have gotten away with it, if he really wanted to.

Fantastic Mr. Fox is a gorgeous film — painstakingly constructed to the point of delight, even for Anderson’s standards. But the movie is also spot-on tonally: it’s quirky without getting precious, emotive without getting morose. At a time when Pixar has more than proven that family movies can be layered and refined, Anderson’s mix of dry wit and unmistakable tenderness blurs the cinematic line between grown-up and kid fare even further, to the benefit of everyone — except for future contributors to the genre, who’ll find that the bar has been set dauntingly high.

The intricate story concerns a blind former film director named Mateo, who now goes by the name Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), the pseudonym he used on all his screenplays. Harry still makes his living as a screenwriter, and gets help in his day-to-day and business affairs from his loyal friend and longtime collaborator Judit (Blanca Portillo), as well as her son, Diego (Tamar Novas). One day, Harry learns that successful businessman Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez) has died. Not long after that, a young man named Ray X meets with Harry to pitch a script about a son who gets revenge on the memory of his father. Harry passes on the job offer, but quickly pieces together that Ray X is, in fact, Ernesto’s son. This leads to Harry sharing with Diego the tragic story about his final movie, a shoot that grew complicated because of a love triangle between Harry, Ernesto (who produced the film), and Ernesto’s mistress Lena (Penélope Cruz) that led to life-changing decisions for everyone involved.

The actual series of events that led to Harry’s blindness are laid out with such fiendish ingeniousness that it would be unfair to spoil how adroitly Almodóvar handles his narrative. He cooks up a melodramatic tale that is equal parts Paul Auster meta-narrative and James M. Cain noir, but he stays clear of soap opera territory thanks in part to first-rate performances. Homar embodies an artist’s restless desire to live life to the fullest, even when he can’t see; Gomez could turn his antagonist into a moustache-twirling baddie, but instead he lets his intensity come out in frightening dead-eyed stares; and Cruz is able to be disarmingly sexy and in emotional turmoil at the same time — something that has made her the key onscreen collaborator for Almodóvar throughout the second half of his career.

Almodóvar fills the movie with his typically gorgeous cinematography, and he’s still unafraid to tackle highly emotional situations and characters — like the flamboyantly gay son trying to win his father’s approval — without letting them devolve into camp. He’s perfected a visual style that borrows equally from Douglas Sirk and Alfred Hitchcock, but he’s synthesized them into a filmmaking approach that’s entirely his own.

While this is all comfortably familiar for an Almodóvar film, what sets Broken Embraces apart from his other movies are the unavoidable biographical aspects. Not only is the hero a director, but he name-checks such classics as Peeping Tom, Louis Malle’s Les Amants, and most tellingly, Fellini’s 8 1/2. The modern Spanish master is doing more than paying simple lip service to the artists and works that inspire him; he makes Broken Embraces a statement about what drives him to continue making movies as he gets older.

Memphis businesswoman and housewife Leigh Anne Tuohy (Sandra Bullock) gets what she wants in life through sheer force of will. Her children attend a ritzy private school, and when the higher-ups there admit Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a disadvantaged African-American kid, because the football coach wants him to play for the school, Leigh Anne focuses all of her considerable energy on giving the boy the kind of loving and stable environment he’s never had. Eventually, he grows close to Leigh Anne, her husband (Tim McGraw), teen daughter, Collins, and cloyingly precocious young son, S.J. Michael works hard to get his grades high enough to play, develops skills as a left tackle, and starts getting letters of interest from big-time college programs. But problems arise when influences from Michael’s past come back into his life, and when the NCAA worries that the Tuohys might be unethically pushing Michael toward attending their alma mater.

The Blind Side is decidedly square. Its uplifting message and thoroughly unashamedly folksy qualities make it a feel-good, three-hanky, you-go-girl, wind-beneath-my-wings piece of sappy inspirationalism. But, it does have some persuasive things in its favor. First of all, it gets football right — those who know nothing about the game will actually learn a little about what an offensive lineman does and how he does it. Secondly, it’s not aggressive in its middlebrowness; the film — like Hancock’s previous sports movie, The Rookie — has a light touch, best exemplified in Tim McGraw’s charmingly laid-back performance as Sean Tuohy, a man unfazed and thoroughly charmed by his outspoken Type-A wife.

And let’s be clear that this is a Sandra Bullock film through and through. She’s essentially playing a less sexually brazen Erin Brockovich — a no-nonsense Southern girl who fights for what’s right, for herself and for her family. It’s not a part that requires much depth, but Bullock fills it with her usual charm, and her core audience will undoubtedly laugh and cry along as Leigh Anne stands up to coaches, gang-bangers, and administrators who stand in her and Michael’s way.

The movie is very familiar — you’ve seen it all before — but it succeeds at achieving its modest goals. It’s cinematic comfort food that could have been called “Chicken Soup for the Football Lover’s Soul.”

In one of the more powerful and moving segments of the film, Shamir follows a group of Israeli high school students on their traditional graduation year trip to Auschwitz, where he comes to the conclusion that their experience is designed to be more traumatic than educational. These young people, who soon will be compelled into military service, essentially have it drummed into their heads that the world hates them, and that Israel is the only safe place for Jews.
 
There’s an empathetic humanity to Shamir’s exploration that makes his tentative conclusions about anti-Semitism and Israel all the more powerful. For all its entertainment value — its abundant humor and drama — Defamation is that rare documentary that forces us to examine our preconceived notions about the world.

The film’s relation to its predecessor, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, is never quite clear, other than the presence of a police protagonist with a penchant for cheap sex, expensive drugs, and gambling on sports. Cage hobbles through the title role of Lieutenant Terence McDonagh like a crackhead Quasimodo, ingesting a chemical mélange of substances to stave off the pain of a chronic back injury as he tries to solve the brutal slaying of a Senegalese family in New Orleans. Cage visibly sheds charisma as the film progresses, devolving from a cocky showboat cop into a squawking dope who desperately projects false bravado and periodically erupts with awkward bursts of incoherent jibberish. Herzog gleefully feeds his scene-chewing star, adding to the already hallucinatory atmosphere of New Orleans with some incongruous iguanas, one alligator carcass, and the incomparable Brad Dourif. Val Kilmer makes an appearance, confirming rumors that he is still alive, and Eva Mendes smolders quite adequately as McDonagh’s requisite prostitute/girlfriend.

Herzog drives the preposterous plot off the rails early, and then begins discarding seemingly essential narrative elements like ballast from a sinking ship. For instance, while McDonagh is in the midst of a heated interrogation, trying to locate an elusive suspect, the wanted man simply walks into the police station and surrenders. Later, a key witness to the crime vanishes from McDonagh’s custody, and is quickly forgotten. Herzog shreds the potboiler drama like wrapping paper, unveiling absurd little gifts like a twitching close-up of the aforementioned iguanas, an obnoxious arcade machine that mechanically chants, “Insert more coins! Insert more coins!” — and 2009’s most quotable movie line: “Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing.” As the convoluted delta of assorted plotlines empty into a glimmering gulf of a finale, Herzog manages to skewer both the Hollywood happy ending and the Bush administration’s response to Katrina. If Herzog’s goal was to craft a compelling police drama, then he failed miserably, but if he intended to create a magnificent cinematic mess, then mission accomplished!

Lem (voice of Justin Long) is a brainy adolescent with a passion for astronomy and a crush on Neera (voice of Jessica Biel) — the little green cutie next door. He lives on Planet 51, a place that’s millions of light years away from Earth, yet bares a striking resemblance to Eisenhower-era America. Much like us, the people on Lem’s planet are fascinated by the prospect that they may not be alone in the universe. But if there are other life forms out there, are they to be feared or embraced? Lem’s just landed a job as assistant curator at the local space museum when a UFO touches down in his neighbor’s yard. The pilot of that ship is Captain Charles T. Baker (voice of Dwayne Johnson). Captain Baker is on a mission to explore other planets, and he was certain that Planet 51 was unoccupied. When the people of Planet 51 discover that they’re being visited by an extraterrestrial, they respond much like we might have back in the 1950s — by completely flipping out. As General Grawl (voice of Gary Oldman) launches a mission to capture the “alien” visitor by any means necessary, Captain Baker implores Lem to help him get back to his ship so he can blast off back to Earth. At first Lem and his friends are terrified of Captain Baker, but the better they get to know him, the more they discover how much they have in common. Unfortunately, there’s no time for fun and games, because if Captain Baker fails to reach his ship before its scheduled take-off, he’ll be stranded on Planet 51 and left to the devices of General Grawl and Professor Kipple (voice of John Cleese), who’s eager to dissect the visitor and learn more about his anatomy.

With a plot that allows him the unique opportunity to both parody and comment on our own culture after nearly five decades of reflection, it’s somewhat unfortunate that screenwriter Joe Stillman would be content to simply coast on references aimed at sci-fi fans and nostalgic music cues. Then again, references were pretty much the driving force of the Shrek films, so perhaps it was to be expected that knowing winks would take precedence over actual plot here, too. It could be that we’ve simply come to expect too much from children’s movies since Pixar raised the bar with films like Finding Nemo and WALL-E — and it’s certainly unfair to compare — but like the Disney classics that came before them, those movies are first and foremost great films, which just happen to have the distinction of being wonderful children’s movies. No one would mistake Planet 51 for a great film; aside from the polished animation there’s just nothing original or innovative enough to distinguish it from the glut of unambitious kiddie flicks that have flooded the multiplexes since computer animation became affordable to independent filmmakers. In fact, we’ve seen this very same plot — and message — as recently as this year’s unfairly dismissed Battle for Terra, which touched on similar themes with much more maturity and insight while simultaneously delivering some exciting 3D thrills. The humor in Planet 51 is sophomoric and flat, the action is muted and uninventive, and the characters are all the kinds of stereotypes that we’ve seen onscreen countless times before. Sure, the message is nice, but that doesn’t change the fact that it comes packaged in a product that’s about as far from inspired as Planet 51 is from Earth.

Crank phone calls went from a private source of adolescent amusement to a record-biz phenomenon when a pair of guys calling themselves the Jerky Boys starting selling tapes of themselves annoying perfect strangers and discovered there was a ready market (the notion even crossed over to the movies with the release of The Jerky Boys Movie and television with the show Crank Yankers). And Johnny Knoxville proved that millions of people are willing to watch grown men talk one another into hurting themselves by turning Jackass into a growth industry.

But Vernon Chatman has taken high-concept entertainment pranking and brought it to a new level with the release of the video feature Final Flesh, in which the prank is being played not on some hapless individual, but on the people actively participating in the creation of the movie. In the history of prankster entertainment, Final Flesh has its most direct precursor in “Blind Man’s Penis”, a curious little record that was the work of underground musician John Trubee. Trubee was between steady gigs and working at a convenience store in 1976 when, while on the late shift, he was flipping through a tabloid newspaper and saw an ad for an outfit called Nashville Co-Writers who claimed they could take your lyrics, set them to music, and get them recorded. Hoping to get an angry rejection letter, Trubee quickly tossed off a surreal and offensive diatribe including lines like “Warts loved my nipples because they are pink/ Vomit on me baby, yeah yeah yeah.” However, after mailing his vile lyrics to Nashville Co-Writers, he received a form letter saying they’d be delighted to arrange and record his lyrics…for a modest fee of $79.95. Trubee forked over the dough, and several weeks later received a cheap, minimal recording of a simple country-style melody with one Ramsey Kearney singing Trubee’s bizarre lyrics in a manner that suggested he was struggling to sound casual while stifling his bafflement. Kearney’s performance also proved that someone had read the lyrics before the recording session — the original chorus, “Stevie Wonder’s penis is erect because he’s blind” was changed to “A blind man’s penis is erect because he’s blind,” presumably to avoid possible legal action. Trubee released the recording as a single in 1982, and it became a minor hit on progressive and college radio stations not put off by the vulgar lyrics.

Vernon Chatman has taken this concept and raised it to the next level, moving from a three-minute song to a full audiovisual onslaught. Chatman is a comedian, actor, and comedy writer best known as a co-creator of the cult-fave TV shows Wonder Showzen, a scabrous parody of children’s television, and Xavier: Renegade Angel, a send-up of fantasy fiction and New Age philosophy decked out in supremely cheesy digital animation. (Chatman was also the voice of Towelie, the constantly stoned talking towel on South Park.) Chatman became aware of several adult entertainment companies who specialize in making custom fetish videos — the customer submits a scenario, and for a fee the producers will hire actors and a crew and create a video from the script. Not unlike Trubee, Chatman wanted to see what would happen if he took these custom porn producers out of their traditional comfort zone, so he wrote a screenplay and divided it into four parts, sending each to a different company.

However, while Chatman’s script was full of bizarre situations and dialogue that weaves back and forth between pretentious and absurd, the story doesn’t feature any sex, and Final Flesh, stitched together from the results submitted by the four production outfits, is a 70-minute document of people who put idiosyncratic erotica on film wrestling with characters, dialogue, and someone’s off-kilter notion of “art.”

Final Flesh reads like the work of some painfully pretentious college freshman of the 1970s or ’80s, full of deliberately overblown and out-of-place dialogue and situations that are as bizarre as they are improbable. The basic idea is simple enough — a family of three are at home, having heard the news that their community is soon to be hit by an atomic bomb, and after father decides they should stay in their home and die with dignity, he banters with his wife and teenage daughter about what’s about to happen and what they could expect if they somehow survive the blast. But Chatman dresses up this framework with remarkable “huh?”-inducing dialogue and freakish set pieces. Imagine anyone trying to recite the following:

“You’re going to clean up the cosmos yourself!”
“I’m raising money to provide subtext for the poor.”
“We’re trapped in nature’s infinite expanse! I can’t breathe!”
“My head’s a dream in a pillow! The bones of the air are breaking!”
“It says the entire universe has been killed in a Spanish boating accident.”

Then there’s the bit where a woman gives birth to a melon, and later her daughter spawns a steak. A woman bathes in liquid from jars labeled “TEARS OF NEGLECTED CHILDREN” and “ANGEL BLOOD.” A door bears a sign reading “Psycho-Sexual Burn Ward.” God sends the family messages via notes slipped under the door. A toilet seat is emblazoned with the slogan “LOCAL SPARROW LICKS SLAVE LIP.” A woman pulls a block of cheese from her husband’s trousers and suggestively grates it, with the filings spelling the word “Nature” on the floor. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg; anyone who dared to take Final Flesh seriously would probably conclude that they’d stumbled upon the most ridiculous piece of post-apocalyptic symbolism ever written, and when Chatman entrusts his writing to people who, to put it charitably, don’t usually deal much with dialogue or character development, the results are very special indeed.

What makes Final Flesh all the more disorienting is that each of the four acts has a look, feel, and personality of its own, adding to the alienation effect of Chatman’s gambit. The first part features three African-American actors and was shot in a small apartment; father is strong and solid, mother is patient and soft-spoken, and their daughter delivers her dialogue so flatly that it’s hard to say what she was trying to do. Part Two moves to a large beach house, with dad seeming goofy and petulant, mom looking and acting like a sexy L.A. earth mother, and the daughter sarcastic and purposefully blank, with died pink hair and a demeanor suggesting porn’s answer to Daria Morgendorffer. The third act, seemingly shot in someone’s living room, is easily the sleaziest; off-camera prompts to the actors are occasionally audible, the cast struggles to trundle as much nudity and pseudo-sexual action as possible onto the screen, and the three actors are uniformly awful (though the daughter’s grating jail-bait persona hits the low ebb among the cast). And the final segment is the one where one imagines the producers had some idea they weren’t doing a typical fetish reel; the lighting is moody, a small amount of care has been put into the camerawork, costumes, and set decoration (as opposed to nil for the other three acts), and the players, who are attractive, seem to have learned their lines in advance and deliver them with some conviction (which doesn’t make them any less silly); the finale is good enough that it looks like a ringer compared to the ineptitude of the other reels.

The core theme behind Final Flesh is “bad screenplay produced badly,” and it provides a certain twisted fun on that level, but the one consistent element that ties these four segments together is the profound disconnect between the cast and the material. While Chatman has given the performers dialogue and situations that would be all but impossible for most actors, these low-rent porn stars are put into the wildly uncomfortable position of trying to play this as written while finding some sort of erotic undercurrent in this stuff, making the not unreasonable assumption that, like their other clients, the guy who wrote this is supposed to be getting off on it somehow, even if the sexual component of the story is as muddled as the rest of the narrative. When the daughter is dared by the Supreme Being to strip near the end of the second act, the actress’s demeanor practically screams “Finally!” And in the third act, the cast seems both bored and confused by the dialogue, springing to stilted life only when someone is supposed to take off their clothes or display some sensual enthusiasm, leaping into action like drowning men grabbing at a life raft (and pushing this closer to hardcore than in any other segment of the film). In Final Flesh, Vernon Chatman has taken 12 people who bring erotic fantasies (often too eccentric for the mainstream porn market) to life, and given them a script that they seem to regard as a sort of puzzle, determined to find the turn-on that lurks amidst the spaghetti, the shouting, and the stuff written on their foreheads. The result is a sort of soft-porn snipe hunt, and if they never find the fictive beast, watching them chase it is just as entertaining here as it was when you pulled that prank on the younger kids at summer camp…though hopefully none of them did anything suggestive with cheese along the way.

Official Site: http://www.dragcity.com/artists/final-flesh

In The Messenger, Foster’s Will Montgomery was injured in Iraq, but when he returns to the United States, he still has three months left in his tour of duty. He reluctantly joins Desert Storm vet Tony Stone in his efforts that have him bringing bad news to mothers, fathers, wives, and girlfriends. There are six notifications in the film, and each brings a new emotional layer as everyone responds differently to the information. Will finds himself particularly affected by his interaction with the newly widowed Olivia (Samantha Morton), whom he continues to contact after their initial meeting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Messenger — and our discussion — was more about connection and compassion than about combat.

When a writer describes Will’s relationships with both Olivia and Tony as “romances,” Foster agrees, “Absolutely. And hopefully, everybody addresses life like that. Everything should be a romance. It’s just cold, if not.” He goes on to elaborate on the seemingly strange interactions within the film and their resemblance to real life. He says, “Like any of us who connect with somebody, we say, ‘I recognize that quality,’ or we feel that quality in ourselves in someone else, or they remind us of something that we don’t like. Which may be also part of us. It’s a difficult one, the relationship between Will and Tony. Only because they got big hearts and don’t know where to put it. And eventually, they connect.”

Will’s association with Morton’s character is equally complicated, Foster explains. “And with Sam (Samantha Morton), Olivia, there’s that frequency of saying, ‘You have felt the way I feel.’ And there’s an attraction there that we don’t always understand. But we say, ‘Oh, that person feels like I feel. I don’t know how to deal with it, but I need to get closer to them. Maybe grow together in some way.’”

The most authentic war films such as Saving Private Ryan are often difficult to watch because of the reality they bring to the screen, but The Messenger is a different experience, both grueling in its emotional rawness and rewarding in both the performances and the film’s message about the value of relationships. Moverman and Foster are admitted fans of war films such as Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, but those weren’t the movies that had an effect on The Messenger. Both men list Hal Ashby as a major influence on their work in this film, particularly The Last Detail and Coming Home.

Moverman adds another layer to the war film genre since the Israeli-born writer-director served in combat himself. “There’s nothing in the movie that I can say, you know, ‘that happened to me or that’s my story,’” he explains. “I wouldn’t know how to do that and I think it would probably be too boring, but what I felt I knew or understood was what we talked about was the emotional landscape of a combat soldier because I was in combat zones.”

In addition to Moverman’s original idea and his own experience, The Messenger was also informed by the lives of soldiers, particularly the men he met at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the army’s casualty notification offices. In fact, the film has the distinction of receiving both approval and advisement from the army. “The guys in the background in Fort Dix are soldiers who had just returned, so we were surrounded by those who had served,” Foster says. “It made the experience a lot easier to, I suppose, absorb, and think less and feel more.”

Meeting the soldiers had an effect beyond just making The Messenger. “It’s just a life-changing experience to see the effects of war outside of these cold, chilly statistics,” Foster recalls. “You see the scars, you touch the scars — touching the scars of a young boy where his leg used to be, and I’m walking away trying to get my head right, and my face starts to burn with the antiseptic, and I touch my tongue and I taste the burn. It gets in your bones to see this, the results of it that close as a civilian. It alters the way you read the news or have a conversation, or listen, more importantly.”

Two soldiers even figured in the naming of the main characters. Will, who was initially called “Derek” in earlier versions of the script, was rechristened after Foster and Moverman were inspired by a young soldier named Will Cook whom they met at Walter Reed. As for Tony, Moverman named him after his close friend Tony Swofford, who wrote Jarhead.

Though Moverman’s experience added to the script, he doesn’t hesitate to differentiate his life as a soldier from those in the film. “I don’t want to make it sound like…I’m some warrior or fighter,” the director says of his four years in the Israeli army. “I was part of two occupations, basically — the occupation of Lebanon and the occupation of Palestine. And so it’s not that dissimilar from the two occupations that are going on right now, except right now it seems bloodier and more chaotic, and also Americans are not in their neighborhood. We were in our neighborhood, for good or bad, in Israel. The whole thing that we talk about in the movie, about coming back from another planet, is this feeling that I think I understood well from being in those places.”

Unlike in the apolitical film, Moverman isn’t shy about sharing his political sensibilities in person. He would like for President Barack Obama to watch his film, but it wasn’t made thinking of the newly elected leader as an audience member. “We shot it during the dark ages of the end of the Bush administration,” he says of the production. “And in our mind, we were naïve enough to think, we want to show it to Bush, thinking there’s some capacity for compassion somewhere in there. I guess we were wrong.” However, his film doesn’t argue for or against war and remains surprisingly and impressively neutral in its politics. “We never framed it in those terms,” Moverman explains. “I think we were trying to be very respectful of the audience and kind of saying we don’t have a political agenda, we just want to show you what the people who have to live with the consequences of war look like in our own little make-believe world. This Vietnam guy said something to me that I felt was very appropriate. ‘There are only three positions on war: there’s pro-war, anti-war, and in war.’”

The film focuses more on feelings as it keeps the fighting in the background, which turns The Messenger into a movie that everyone can identify with, not jut soldiers or those who have lost someone in war. “It’s like any of us, we deal with trauma and have to get through the day,” Foster says of the film’s broader appeal. “We deal with a loss and we have to show up to work. And how do you get through that day and do the stupid, menial, clumsy, human-being tasks that we all have to do? Take out the trash, do the laundry, pick up your socks. And someone that you love is gone, so approaching it in a very simple way — it’s difficult out there, being a person. And these are extreme circumstances, but universal….”

Moverman adds, “We all know about death. We all experience notifications in real life. You don’t have to be in the military to know what it feels like to be told someone you love is gone or to tell someone that someone they love is gone. Those are such basic connections into this movie. The fact that it takes place in the military adds a particular backdrop and a particular layer to the movie, but it in its essence, it’s about how do you get back to life having experienced pain and loss? The answers are so simple, so basic that we tend to forget: love, friendship, humor, connections, making connections with people, relationships. How else would you survive life?”

Ultimately, The Messenger goes beyond the narrative of the traditional Iraq war film and offers a story that all people can identify with, whether they’ve carried an army-issued weapon or a war protest sign. “People are reacting emotionally to the movie,” Moverman says. “And I feel like, for us, that’s a really great gift. I know personally it’s very hard to find emotions in movies anymore. They’re all so constructive about how you feel, how to feel. The score tells you how to feel, a lot of button-pressing because everything’s so shorthand these days. So if people find the patience to dialogue with the movie, to interact with it — because I think it is respectful of the audience — and get some sort of thing out of it, whether it’s political or human or information, then we feel great about that.”

His movie, Pirate Radio, opens with the recently expelled Carl (Tom Sturridge) arriving at Radio Rock, one of the most popular pirate radio stations in all of London. Carl’s godfather, Quentin (Bill Nighy), who owns the boat and the station, gives the young man a job and shy Carl soon meets the outlandish DJs that make Radio Rock a must-listen for kids on shore. Among the motley crew members are “The Count” (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the lone American on the ship and a true believer in the power and glory of the music; the horny, chunky Dave (Nick Frost); the quiet, impossibly handsome Mark (Tom Wisdom); and the drugged-out proto-hippie Bob (Ralph Brown). The group keeps things lively with lots of shenanigans, including the Count’s efforts to say the F-word on the air, their intricate schemes to get Carl laid, and the creative ways in which the crew fights back against the sustained efforts of a repressed government bureaucrat (Kenneth Branagh) to wipe out all the pirate stations.

In his previous films, Curtis has shown a masterful ability to juggle large ensembles. Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually burst with three-dimensional characters that have distinct arcs — they grow and change no matter how little screen time they might get. And that’s what’s missing entirely from Pirate Radio. With the exception of Carl — who, it turns out, got on the ship because he believes the father he never met works there — everybody in the film is a personality rather than a person.

Of course, Curtis is too talented to not serve up some funny moments with each of them — the remarkable stupidity of Carl’s roommate is a first-rate recurring gag, as is the simmering feud between the Count and Gavin (Rhys Ifans), a once-legendary DJ who makes an unexpected return to Radio Rock. Unfortunately, because these characters never become three-dimensional, the movie turns out to be a series of incidents rather than an actual story. To put it in rock terms, Pirate Radio is a collection of songs rather than a coherent album — and while there are a couple of good tracks, the majority of them are unremarkable.