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Directed by Joe Wright. Screenplay by Christopher Hampton. Based on the novel by Ian McEwan. Starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy.

“A young girl… sees something from her bedroom window that she doesn’t understand, but that she thinks she does.” So 18-year-old Briony Tallis describes the story she’s writing that about an incident that happened five years earlier, an incident that forever changed the lives of Briony’s sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley), Cecilia’s lover (James McAvoy), and Briony herself.

The tap-tap-tapping of a typewriter is woven into the movie’s soundtrack and...

Friday, February 15, 2008
by Annie Lux

Directed by Jason Reitman. Screenplay by Diablo Cody. Starring Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Jason Bateman, and Jennifer Garner.

Finally, a Best Picture nominee in which no one gets shot, there is no blood, and no one does anything reprehensible. Instead we have the story of Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page), an offbeat teenager who finds herself pregnant after her first and only sexual experience—an encounter that’s more experiment than romance with her best buddy, Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera). She plans for an abortion but can’t go through with it, so she and her friend Leah (Olivia Thurlby) find...

Friday, February 15, 2008
by Annie Lux

Written and directed by Tony Gilroy. Starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton.

From the very first moments of Michael Clayton, the stress level is high. The urgent ranting of a desperate man is heard over the lit-up skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan. In the boardroom of a prestigious New York law firm, an army of attorneys labors through the night. Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton) is sweating bullets in the ladies’ room. And then we see Michael Clayton (George Clooney) in a seedy, high-stakes card game. He’s losing, and not just at cards: he’s recently lost his shirt in a bar...

Friday, February 15, 2008
by Annie Lux

Written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Starring Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem and Kelly Mcdonald.

No Country for Old Men, the newest offering from the prolific Coen Brothers, has already collected a slew of awards from various film critics’ societies as well as a handful of Golden Globe nominations. It’s also at the top of my own list of best films I’ve seen this year. Not everyone may agree: as I left the theater I heard more than one of my fellow moviegoers grumbling, “ That was the ending??” True, viewers expecting a standard Hollywood thriller with clear-cut...

Friday, February 15, 2008
by Annie Lux

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Based on the novel Oil by Upton Sinclair. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, and Dillon Freasier.

As the last days of Gilded Age fade into the early 20th century, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) works his way up from silver miner to oil man, taking his baby son H.W. from place to place as he buys up drilling rights in small towns. When a young man sells information about an oil deposit on his family’s ranch, Daniel heads out to Little Boston, California, to scope out the land, pretending to be on a camping trip with H.W., now a little...

Friday, February 15, 2008
by Annie Lux