Set across a stunning backdrop ranging from New York to Paris to Cadaqués, Savage Grace is the incredible true story of a scandal that even today remains shocking. The beautiful Barbara Daly (Academy Award-nominee Julianne Moore; The Hours, Boogie Nights) marries above her social class to the dashing heir of the Bakelite plastics fortune, Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane of the HBO miniseries "John Adams"). The birth of the couple's only child, Tony (Eddie Redmayne of The Good Shepard), intensifies the already volatile marriage. As Tony matures, he becomes an unwilling pawn in the psychosexual games of his parents, and the seeds for a tragedy of spectacular decadence are sown which challenge even the most shocking taboos. Tom kalin's (Swoon) return to cinema has dazzled and stunned audiences from the Cannes to the Sundance Film Festivals.
Stills from Savage Grace (Click for larger image) A missed flight...a lack of intimacy...! guarded secrets... To Catherine (Julianne Moore), every detail! suggest s that her husband David (Liam Neeson) has been unfaithful. But there's only one way to know for sure. Catherine pays the mysterious Chloe (Amanda Seyfriend), an escort, to seduce her husband. She wants to know exactly how far she can trust him. But soon Catherine finds herself pushed beyond all limits as passions burn and obsessions build. From Academy Award®-nominated director Atom Egoyan (
The Sweet Hereafter, 1997).
"Intriguing, darkly erotic." -Tom Keogh, Seattle Times
"A supercharged erotic thriller!" -Caryn James, Marie Claire
"…a sexually charged drama…" -Bruce Kirkland, Toronto Sun
"good, dirty fun." -Ain't It Cool News
"devilishly sexy." -Paul Fischer, Dark Horizons
In the erotic thriller
Chloe, Dr. Catherine Stewart (Julianne Moore,
A Single Man) suspects that her husband David (Liam Neeson,
Taken) is cheating on her. So she hires an escort named Chloe (Amanda Seyfried,
Mamma Mia!! ) to offer herself to him, to see how he responds--but Catherine has a surprising response to what unfolds, and Chloe becomes drawn deeply into the doctor's life.
Chloe is an atypical "Hollywood" film from Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan (
The Sweet Hereafter,
Exotica), as it features big stars, a script Egoyan didn't write himself (it's by Erin Cressida Wilson, the screenwriter of
Secretary), an editing rhythm notably less idiosyncratic than Egoyan films of old, and an ending that feels forced and unsatisfying. But
Chloe explores classic Egoyan obsessions: voyeurism, jealousy, and betrayal. As the movie unfolds, the performances are full of rich details, capturing jagged emotional edges that make the somewhat-implausible plot compelling.
Chloe doesn't have the uncanny psychological acuity of Egoyan's best films, but anyone who's enjoyed this unique director's earlier work will find much to enjoy.
--Bret Fetzer Stills from Chloe (Click for lar! ger imag e) Haunted by the memories of a son her husband swears she never had, a distraught mother's search for the truth leads to a mind-shattering conspiracy of unearthly terror.With a plot that might've been lifted from The X-Files, nothing is quite what it seems in The Forgotten, a psychological conspiracy thriller with Julianne Moore doing fine work as a grieving mother whose nine-year-old son was killed in a plane crash. At least, that's what she's been led to believe, but when even her ! husband (Anthony Edwards) tries to convince her that she's del! usional and never had a child, things start to get very spooky indeed. Dominic West (from HBO's superb series The Wire) plays a similarly traumatized father, and when they witness some very strange events--and a mysterious man (Linus Roache) who might be indestructible--this glorified B-movie potboiler directed by Joseph Ruben (best known for Dreamscape and The Stepfather) turns into a preposterous but entertaining trip into The Twilight Zone territory. Featuring Alfre Woodard as an intuitive New York detective and Gary Sinise as a seemingly sympathetic psychiatrist, The Forgotten offers adequate shocks and an intriguing, otherworldly study of tenacious parental instinct. It deserved its mixed reviews, but it's a fun spook-fest for rainy-day viewing. --Jeff ShannonFAR FROM HEAVEN - DVD MovieThis uniquely beautiful film--from one of the smartest and most idiosyncratic of contemporary directors, Todd Haynes (Safe, Velvet Gol! dmine)--takes the lush 1950s visual style of so-called women's pictures (particularly those of Douglas Sirk, director of Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession) to tell a story that mixes both sexual and racial prejudice. Julianne Moore, an amazing fusion of vulnerability and will power, plays a housewife whose husband (Dennis Quaid) has a secret gay life. When she finds solace in the company of a black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), rumors and peer pressure destroy any chance she has at happiness. It's astonishing how a movie with such a stylized veneer can be so emotionally compelling; the cast and filmmakers have such an impeccable command of the look and feel of the genre that every moment is simultaneously artificial and deeply felt. Far from Heaven is ingenious and completely engrossing. --Bret FetzerAnything is possible with a little laughter and a lot of heart in this incredible true story of an extraordinary woman who ra! ised 10 kids on 25 words or less. Academy Award® nominee Juli! anne Moo re stars as Evelyn Ryan, a devoted housewife and mother, who uses her knack for words to win thousands of dollars in jingle contests to keep her family together. Also starring Academy Award® nominee Woody Harrelson, this witty and engaging comedy celebrates the power of a winning spirit.Based on the true story of Evelyn Ryan, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio is one of those overlooked gems that deserves a long life on DVD. Splendidly adapted by writer-director Jane Anderson from the memoir by Terry Ryan (one of Evelyn's daughters), the film operates on several endearing levels: as a revealing study of the housewife's plight during the Eisenhower era, an inspiring tale of tenacity and survival against formidable odds, and a charming family drama that tempers sentimental nostalgia with the emotional toll of harsh reality. As always, Julianne Moore brings subtle perfection to her role as Evelyn, the cheerfully strong-willed mother of ten who compensates for the failin! gs of her alcoholic husband (Woody Harrelson) by becoming the most successful "contester" in the country, entering cleverly-worded poems, jingles, and slogans in corporate sponsored contests throughout the mid-1950s and early '60s. Winning everything from palm trees and pogo-sticks to sports cars and cash, she holds the financially desperate family together with happy smiles and a rock-solid defiance of her husband's volatile temper. Directing her first feature after a respected career in television, Anderson employs some delightful visual effects to liven up the period kitsch (in some cases allowing Moore, as narrator and actor, to appear with herself in the same scene), but she never compromises the emotional core of the drama, which yields an unexpectedly powerful payoff when surviving members of the real-life Ryan family appear, as themselves, in the film's touching final scene. Like Evelyn, this movie's a winner. --Jeff ShannonAcademy Award® nominees Annette Be! ning and Julianne Moore star in this funny, smart and vibrant ! portrait of a modern American family. Nic (Bening) and Jules (Moore) are your average suburban couple raising their two teens, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), in Southern California. But when the kids secretly track
down their “donor dad,†Paul (Mark Ruffalo), an unexpected new chapter begins for everyone as family ties are defined, re-defined and then re-re-defined. Fall in love with the big-hearted comedy that critics are calling “one of the best films of the year!â€
(Michael Phillips, At the Movies)If the relationships that anchor Lisa Cholodenko's warmly funny films appear unconventional, their problems--their pleasures--remain universal. In The Kids Are All Right (no relation to the Who documentary), she takes on a suburban Los Angeles family with two teens, Joni (Alice in Wonderland's Mia Wasikowska) and the unfortunately named Laser (Josh Hutcherson, The Bridge to Terabithia), and two mothers, Nic (Annette Bening) and J! ules (an atypically relaxed Julianne Moore), who conceived via artificial insemination. Now that she's heading off to college, Laser urges 18-year-old Joni to seek out their birth father, who lives in the area (her name comes from folksinger Mitchell). Though she hits it off with Paul (Mark Ruffalo, effortlessly charming), a motorcycle-riding restaurant owner, Laser has his doubts (troublingly, the 15-year-old's best friend uses "faggot" as an all-purpose epithet). After they introduce Paul to their parents, allegiances start to shift. While Nic, a doctor, serves as breadwinner (and disciplinarian), Jules, a homemaker-turned-landscape artist, provides the nurturing. Paul, on the other hand, lives free from attachments, inciting both curiosity and suspicion. Furthermore, Jules finds him strangely irresistible, which only expands the fissures in her loving, yet unstable union. As with Laurel Canyon, Cholodenko doesn't just create fully rounded characters, but entire co! mmunities. In the end, Kids isn't about children vs. ad! ults as much as the family unit vs. the singular outsider. Though the story concludes on a relatively happy note, it's clear where her allegiances lie. --Kathleen C. FennessyEND OF THE AFFAIR - DVD Movie"This is a diary of hate," pounds out novelist Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) on his typewriter as he recounts the lost love of his life in this spiritual memoir (based on Graham Greene's novel) with a startling twist. It's London 1946, and Maurice runs into his achingly dull school friend Henry (Stephen Rea with a perpetually gloomy hangdog expression). Their meeting is brittle, all small talk and chilly, mannered civility beautifully captured by director-screenwriter Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), and it only barely thaws when Henry suggests that his wife Sarah (the luminous Julianne Moore) may be having an affair. Maurice's mind reels back to his passionate affair with Sarah during the war years, which she abruptly broke off two years ago, and gripped with a jealous! y that hasn't abated he hires a private detective (a mousy, marvelous Ian Hart) to shadow her movements. He prepares himself for the revelation of a rival, but instead finds a deeper, more profound secret: "I tempted fate," she writes in her diary, "and fate accepted." Jordan's cool remove captures the unease beneath formal manners but never warms into intimacy during the scenes between the lovers, even while Fiennes and Moore almost explode in repressed emotions, their faces cracking under their masks of civility and their resolve shaking through jittery body language. There's more thought than feeling behind this collision of passion and spirituality, but it's a sincere, richly realized portrait of ennui and rage against God energized by brief moments of shattering drama. --Sean Axmaker"This is a diary of hate," pounds out novelist Maurice Bendrix (Ralph Fiennes) on his typewriter as he recounts the lost love of his life in this spiritual memoir (based on Grah! am Greene's novel) with a startling twist. It's London 1946, a! nd Mauri ce runs into his achingly dull school friend Henry (Stephen Rea with a perpetually gloomy hangdog expression). Their meeting is brittle, all small talk and chilly, mannered civility beautifully captured by director-screenwriter Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), and it only barely thaws when Henry suggests that his wife, Sarah (the luminous Julianne Moore), may be having an affair. Maurice's mind reels back to his passionate affair with Sarah during the war years, which she abruptly broke off two years ago. Gripped with a jealousy that hasn't abated, he hires a private detective (a mousy, marvelous Ian Hart) to shadow her movements. He prepares himself for the revelation of a rival but instead finds a deeper, more profound secret: "I tempted fate," she writes in her diary, "and fate accepted."
Jordan's cool remove captures the unease beneath formal manners but never warms into intimacy during the scenes between the lovers, even while Fiennes and Moore almost explode i! n repressed emotions, their faces cracking under their masks of civility and their resolve shaking through jittery body language. There's more thought than feeling behind this collision of passion and spirituality, but it's a sincere, richly realized portrait of ennui and rage against God energized by brief moments of shattering drama. --Sean AxmakerA doctor's wife becomes the only person with the ability to see in a town where everyone is struck with a mysterious case of sudden blindness. She feigns illness in order to take care of her husband as her surrounding community breaks down into chaos and disorder. Based on a novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago.
Based on José Saramago's allegorical novel, Blindness is a haunting film that works like an unusual fusion of fable and gritty suspense. Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo star as an unnamed, married couple living in an unidentified city where a mass epidemic of blindness hits. Ruffalo's character, ! a doctor, is affected, but Moore's is not. When the two are tr! ansferre d to a government-run quarantine facility complete with armed guards, they soon find themselves in a rapidly deteriorating situation. Criminals take over food distribution and extort possessions and sex from the innocent. Sanitation becomes a thing of the past. More subtly, rules that might govern one's judgement and behavior on an everyday basis simply vanish, and personal and collective values rewrite themselves. Moore's character hides the fact that she can see (except from her spouse), and thus becomes the audience's surrogate in the thick of so much misery. She also becomes an avenging angel at exactly the right time, and then a matriarch when the action shifts from the quarantine hell to the city's streets. The latter part of Blindness finds a handful of the inmates (played by Danny Glover and Alice Braga, among others) joining Moore and Ruffalo in a kind of post-apocalypse oasis, a chapter as touching as the previous chapters were nightmarish.
Director Fe! rnando Meirelles deftly captures the film's spirit of mixed parable and horror, grounding the action but at the same time encouraging a viewer not to take it too literally. He honors Saramago's creative depiction of blindness not as a field of black but, in this case, as an ocean of white. He also does some tricky, disorienting things with the camera, shooting at odd angles, putting his frame around strange details in a scene--all of it has a way of giving a viewer a feeling of what it's like to perceive the world in a whole new way. --Tom Keogh
