Movie Reviews

Happy new year everyone! I had a nice long break from work and managed to see several movies. I'm doing them all in one post with only brief reviews for each.

I'll start with the one I think is the "must-see" movie of the bunch that I saw. Doubt, starring Merryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, is an incredibly powerful movie based on a Pulitzer winning play. Merryl Streep plays nun who is the principal at a Catholic school who is convinced that the head priest (played by Hoffman) has done something inappropriate even though she has no evidence or proof. Like any good piece of theater, it lays the situation at the viewers' feet and we are left with many questions to ponder about what we possibly would have done in that situation. You must put this on your list of movies to see.

Valkyrie was a better movie than I thought it would be. I thought that knowing the outcome of the assassination attempt on Hitler would render the movie somewhat pointless. But I was on the edge of my seat engrossed in the complexities of how these people were not only going to assassinate him, but take over the SS and make peace with the Allies. If you don't get to the theater to see this, you should put this on your rental list.

The Reader was also a very good movie that you should put on your watch list. Kate Winslet stars as a 30 year old German train conductor who seduces a 15 year old boy whom she asks to read aloud to her the books he's studying in school until one day when she abruptly moves away without saying goodbye. Years later when he is in law school he attends a trial of Nazi war criminals and sees that she's one of the defendants. He comes to a realization that she's hiding a deep secret and will go to any lengths to keep it hidden, even if that means she'll get a harsher sentence in the trial. It was a very interesting study about the character and her desperation regarding this secret.

I also went to see Synecdoche, New York starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. It's a weird indy movie, which I was in the mood to watch. Only see this if you're jonesing for a weird indy movie.

And last, I rented The 25th Hour starring Edward Norton. This is another really good movie that I missed back in 2002 and finally caught up with. He's a convicted criminal who is going to jail and this is the 24 hours leading up to his imprisonment. I'm glad I finally saw this one. It's been sitting around for almost two months (since I got my Kindle). This is very well acted with Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin, Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Am I a Philip Seymour Hoffman fan girl? Hmm....