Leonidas is played by Scottish actor Gerard Butler. Butler’s accent sounds more tartan than Spartan, but with his bulked-up frame topped off by an authentic ancient Greek beard and helmet-head haircut, he looks like a statue of Heracles come to life. He’s the linchpin of the entire film, and after the bleach-blond unbelievability of Colin Farrell’s Alexander the Great and Brad Pitt’s Achilles, he’s impressively convincing.

Because the film is based on history, we get the backstory mainly through bits narrated to us by the same character who will eventually narrate it to the rest of Sparta. But because the film is also based on a graphic novel by comic-book auteur Frank Miller, historical accuracy is hardly the point. This film isn’t aiming for documentary realism; it’s aiming for Miller’s particular brand of pulpy fanboy fantasy, and it hits that mark as accurately as a Spartan-thrown spear. In Miller’s hands, the story becomes a mythologized Homeric version of Herodotus’s historical account. Our 300 heroes aren’t up against mere men: the Persian elite unit known as the Immortals are more like monsters. As if that weren’t enough, the Persian ruler Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is an eight-foot-tall demigod decked out in sharp fingernails and head-to-toe gold jewelry. It’s the kind of thing the ancient Greeks would have appreciated.

The film’s other influences are clear—Miller’s graphic novel was inspired by the 1962 film The 300 Spartans, and the writers borrow from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator to deepen Leonidas’s relationship with his wife, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey)—but the computer-generated visuals take the sword-and-sandal epic to new heights of bronze-toned glossiness. Like Robert Rodriguez did in his brilliant 2005 adaptation of Miller’s Sin City, director and co-writer Zack Snyder draws storyboards and dialogue directly from the graphic novel. Unlike Rodriguez, however, Snyder doesn’t pull off a seamless integration of Miller’s distinctive artwork into the moving medium. When it’s not in Matrix-style battle scene mode, the film is less like a motion picture than a graphic novel writ large, a series of stunning images suitable for freeze-framing on wall-mounted widescreens.

But when it is in motion, 300 is a hypnotic dance of blood-spattering ultraviolence as the disciplined Spartan phalanx impales and amputates its way through wave after wave of Persians. The bodies literally pile up; in one scene, the Spartans use them as “mortar” in the wall they’ve rebuilt to keep the Persians bottlenecked. Speaking of “hypnotic dance,” there’s also a scene in which an all-but-naked female oracle does a spasmodic back-arching number, presumably to help her predict the battle’s outcome. There’s also a steamy interlude between Leonidas and Gorgo in which bums and breasts figure prominently. (In Miller’s world, the only thing harder than the men are the women’s nipples.) When sex and death are this brazenly stylized, it’s hard to decide which is sexier.

***~ (3/4)

With Superman Returns, director Bryan Singer pulls off a super-rescue of his own: saving a 28-year-old film franchise from campy, crappy irrelevance.

The challenge was considerable. Superman may be the epitome of the comic-book superhero, but it’s always been the idea of Superman that has captivated people. Every realization of Superman—from DC Comics to television to film—has come up against the same problem: how do you make him interesting? With his godlike powers and goody-goody attitude, he’s somewhere between Christ and the guileless hero of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. He can sustain one great film (1978’s Superman), and maybe one good sequel (1980’s Superman II). But when the ideas run out, he ends up becoming the unwitting butt of the joke, a caricature of goodness forced to act as straight man to, say, Richard Pryor (in the wretched 1983 sequel, Superman III). And by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, when he’s being taunted by Jon Cryer while duking it out with a nuclear-powered adversary, all we’re left with is John Williams’ brilliant score to remind us of the original idea of Superman. So with this remake coming 20 years later, the question that comes to mind is, “Does the world still need Superman?”

Singer, who showed with the first two X-Men films how well comic-book characters can be adapted to the screen, solves this super-problem in three ways.

First, he turns the question of whether we need Superman into a question of whether Superman needs us. The film begins by telling us that Superman (Brandon Routh, who manages to make Superman his own while delivering a pure Christopher Reeve homage as Clark Kent) has been gone for five years, searching for survivors of his alien race after Earth astronomers discover what remains of his exploded planet, Krypton. We later learn that Superman took off for home without bothering to say goodbye to his sometime girlfriend, Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth). He also left without showing up in court to testify against his nemesis, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey). These uncharacteristic oversights both matter to the story, but they’re more important as a way of giving Superman a sorely needed enigmatic side.

Second, Singer gets the whole unnecessary-remake issue out in the open. In fact, he and co-writers Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris turn it into a major theme in the film. In Superman’s absence, Lois wrote a Pulitzer-winning editorial entitled “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman.” Not only has she gotten over the Man of Steel; she’s also shacked up with another man (James Marsden, who played Cyclops in the X-Men films), and she has a young son who may or may not be Superman’s.

What happens to that damaged relationship between Superman and Lois after he returns dictates the film’s soft, understated tone. Slow-paced and deliberate in its allusions to both Christian and ancient Greek mythology, this is not a film for those expecting a slam-bang effects extravaganza. There are some great action sequences—especially the rescue of a crashing airplane that announces Superman’s return to the world—but the emphasis here is more on who Superman is than on what he does. (That said, watching a bullet bounce off Superman’s eyeball has got to be about the coolest thing you’ll see in an action flick this year.)

The third thing Singer does right is Lex Luthor. The misguided dame (Parker Posey) is still with him, but the oafish sidekick Otis is thankfully gone. Due respect to Gene Hackman, but does anyone do callous, offhanded evil better than Kevin Spacey? This Luthor finally has the murderous menace to go with his diabolically ambitious scheme—in this case, a Promethean plan to use Kryptonian technology to build himself a new continent and kill a few billion people in the offing. That kind of villainy makes Superman as needed in his world as he is, still, to everyone in our world who ever dreamed a man could fly.

***~ (3/4)

The Fountain stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as what appears to be the same couple in a triptych of stories spanning 1,000 years. The first story, which takes place in about the year 1500, is about a conquistador who goes to the New World to save Queen Isabella of Spain from a bloodthirsty inquisitor bent on overthrowing the monarchy. In the second story, a modern-day drug researcher discovers a miracle drug while trying to find a cure for his wife’s brain tumour before it kills her. The third story is a beautifully trippy but mystifying bit of futuristic weirdness in which Jackman’s shaven-headed spacefarer zooms toward a dying star in a bubble-ship just big enough for him and a gnarled old tree that may or may not contain Weisz’s dormant body. Mixed into a nonlinear narrative, these three stories have elements that seem to overlap (and they have endings that could be considered similar), but we’re never quite clear about why or how.

So what’s the deal? Is this pair of star-crossed lovers immortal? Are they reincarnated? Is the whole thing a messed-up dream Jackman’s character is having? There are some cryptic clues seeded throughout the film: an unfinished book that modern-day Weisz is writing; an ancient Mayan myth about where people go when they die; and a tree that may hold the secret of eternal life. But these clues are ambiguous; this is not a film for people who like their movie meanings served up plain (and that includes anyone who goes in thinking the film is sci-fi). Aronofsky want us to do the intellectual heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, that intelligence works against the film’s one obvious point. Aronofsky, whose previous two films (1998’s Pi and 2000’s Requiem for a Dream) also combined moments of powerful intensity with moments of incomprehensible strangeness, is a strong technical director, and clearly a guy who lives in his head a lot of the time. The ideas driving this film are big ones, and a certain scene is repeated enough for us to get the drift that it has something to do with living in the moment instead of obsessing about the past or the future. But thinking about living in the moment is not living in the moment—and that’s the problem with the film.

Jackman and Weisz both give impressive performances (and both spend a fair amount of time with tears in their eyes). They don’t have the kind of chemistry that starts Hollywood rumours, but chemistry isn’t the issue here. There’s a sterility to the proceedings, a clinical distance even in the super-extreme close-ups of the peach fuzz on Weisz’s skin responding to Jackman’s touch. The Fountain is ultimately a love story we observe objectively, without emotion. It’s all head and no heart, a film that shows us a lot of brilliantly photographed moments but never finds the life in them. At least when those grateful people on TV say it’s best to live every moment, you know they mean it.

**½~ (2.5/4)

In fact, even calling the film “Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain” is too simple. Though some of its bigger themes of love, loss and regret in a too-rigid society are reminiscent of previous Lee films like Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback owes its modern-Western authenticity and literary texture to a pair of Pulitzer-winning writers: Larry McMurtry, who co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Diana Ossana; and Annie Proulx, who wrote the original short story.

Actually, the basic plot is pretty simple. In 1963, two young ranch hands in Wyoming get hired to mind a herd of sheep for a summer. Alone together on the titular mountain, Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) alternate roles: one spends nights on the mountain with the sheep, while the other cooks and maintains their camp. One night they get drunk, too drunk for either of them to ride back to the sheep, and the cold forces them to share their small tent.

That first, violently passionate sexual encounter sets the tone for the ambiguities that define both the central relationship between Ennis and Jack, and the film as a whole. (”You know, I ain’t queer,” Ennis tells Jack the next morning. “Me neither,” Jack replies.) Eventually, their relationship spans decades. Both men lead the “normal” life expected of them, complete with wife and kids. But as often as they can, they use the guise of fishing trips to escape back to literal and figurative nature.

But like much of Ennis’s stoic, man-of-few-words personality, his physical unavailability leaves Jack wanting more. Where Jack is the dreamer who can imagine a life for the two of them despite everything, Ennis is the earthbound realist whose daddy once made damn sure Ennis knew what can happen to ranchers who shack up together.

That vital difference is clear enough in the characters’ dialogue, but the actors lend it a whole other level of depth. That’s especially true of Heath Ledger. He looks and sounds exactly like the kind of fellow you’d expect to find herding sheep in Wyoming (or for that matter, raising cattle in Fort Macleod, Alberta, where the film was actually shot). Squinty-eyed and tight-lipped, he mumbles half his lines and grunts the other half—and I mean that with the awestruck respect of someone who has just seen the guy from A Knight’s Tale deliver a portrayal that is better than Oscar-worthy. (None of this is to detract from Jake Gyllenhaal; it’s doubtful that Ledger’s Ennis would have been as effective without Gyllenhaal’s wide-eyed, idealistic Jack as a counterpoint.)

It falls to Ledger to utter the film’s cryptic but crucial final line. I won’t tell you what that line is (you already know if you’ve read the short story), but I will say that it makes for an ending as perfect as it is profoundly tragic. This film is one of the rare ones. It will hit you hard, then quietly haunt your mind for days. See it. You’ll love it, I swear.

**** (4/4)

Walk the Line

Whatever personal demons may or may not have driven the Man in Black until his death September 12, 2003, one thing is clear in both this film and in Cash’s real life: June Carter was as much his salvation as the God that Cash praised in his gospel songs.

In a lot of ways, June Carter is also the salvation of this good-but-not-great movie. Played with verve and steel by Reese Witherspoon (who grew up in Nashville), she’s more interesting than Joaquin Phoenix’s Cash—something her real-life counterpart probably was too, despite the man’s towering persona.

Nevertheless, that indelible but somehow elusive persona is the point here, and Phoenix never quite captures it. Reportedly hand-picked by Cash himself, the actor gives an admirably earnest and hard-working performance (he and Witherspoon even learned to sing and play the instruments they use in the performance scenes), but it only hits perfect pitch during the Folsom scenes. His “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash” sounds authentic, but it never really feels authentic. (In fact, the 30 seconds or so that Shooter Jennings appears onscreen playing his old man Waylon might make you want to watch that biopic instead.)

Phoenix doesn’t get much help from director and co-writer James Mangold, whose standard-issue biopic plot is more about toeing the line than walking it. See Johnny nearly blow his Sun Records audition until he plays his own stuff instead of recycled gospel! See Johnny get turned on to speed by Elvis! See Johnny self-destruct at the Grand Ole Opry! Mangold could just as easily have given us these well-documented talking points in a VH1 Behind the Music special.

Come to think of it, maybe what makes Walk the Line fall short of greatness is the same problem that plagues most biopics about musicians. Maybe it isn’t the actors or the filmmakers; maybe it’s the musicians. It seems that no matter how singular the personality—Ray Charles and Jim Morrison have also been well and famously portrayed—the life story inevitably descends into the rock-star clichés of sex, drug addiction, failed marriages and burnout. Cash the musician was undeniably great, but his music itself will always be the finest testimonial to that greatness. As for Cash the man, well, maybe it’s not this film that’s a tad generic; maybe it’s the subject.

***~ (3/4)

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

—Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

It’s easy to see how Sin City earned its R rating. It’s a hell of a film—dark, violent, graphic, so hard-boiled it could crack concrete. It’s also one of the most visually accomplished comic-book adaptations ever made.

Let’s get one thing clear right off: this Sin City ain’t Las Vegas. Oh, there’s plenty of vice in Vegas, but Basin City—well, Basin City is something else altogether. It’s a place of crumbling tenements and rain-slicked streets where daylight is as rare as an honest politician. It’s a place where the people live in cheap smoke-filled taverns, one-room flophouses and seedy backrooms. It’s a place of broken dreams, broken hearts and broken noses. It’s a place where everything and everyone is for sale, and the only ones more corrupt than the crooks are the cops. And the good guys? Well, they’re just a little less bad than the bad guys.

In other words, it’s the iconic city of film noir. Originally mapped out in short stories and novels by writers like Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, it’s been depicted in a few dozen classic films, ripped off in countless not-so-classic ones, and wholeheartedly appropriated by writer/graphic novelist Frank Miller.

Miller, a comic-book veteran whose grim, noirish Dark Knight series took the Batman character into hard-boiled territory, gets a co-director credit on this film—and rightfully so, because many of the shots are lifted directly from Miller’s Sin City graphic novels. Which is a good thing, because it’s doubtful a director as uninteresting as Robert Rodriguez could have pulled this off by himself. Rodriguez is an obvious devotee of the Tarantino school of pulp-inspired ultra-violence, but until now he’s never shown that he has anything to offer beyond cartoonish gunplay or the kid-friendly action of the Spy Kids movies. With Miller’s storyboards as a template, Rodriguez almost perfectly recreates the stylized film-negative look and gritty atmosphere of the graphic novels.

The film is roughly divided into three major stories: a hulking ex-con named Marv (an astonishing Mickey Rourke) goes on a vengeance-fuelled mission to find out who framed him and killed the hooker he loved; an aging detective (Bruce Willis) tries to find a serial child killer before he claims his fourth victim; and a guy who has come back to town to start a new life (Clive Owen) gets into big trouble after he trails his girlfriend’s abusive ex (Benicio Del Toro) into a part of town run by a gang of prostitutes.

Continuing the grand tradition of hard-boiled detective fiction, Miller and Rodriguez populate the film with a bunch of mugs as ugly as the dames are gorgeous. Facial scars and physical deformities abound; Marv’s face is a remarkable landscape of bandages, bloody wounds, deep lines and a chin that looks as though it’s been carved from a granite block. As for the women, I could never top Raymond Chandler in describing former Dark Angel star Jessica Alba: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”

But the aspect of the film’s atmosphere that makes it so much stronger than supposedly dark predecessors (like the first Batman film) is its sexually charged violence. Miller descends from the Mickey Spillane line of writers who upped the ante in their detective-heroes’ brutality and ruthlessness; two of the film’s nominal heroes are borderline psychotics for whom killing is often an enjoyable pastime. (”I love hitmen,” muses one character. “No matter what you do to them, you don’t feel bad.”) It’s not for everyone—and some of the more extreme scenes are truly stomach-turning—but to criticize this film for being too violent is to miss the point entirely. In a review of Hammett, Dorothy Parker called his hard-boiled style “as American as a sawed-off shotgun.” She got the point.

***½ (3.5/4)

Finding Neverland

The nice little man in question is James Matthew Barrie, and the play he wrote is Peter Pan. The film is set in London in 1904, just as Barrie (Johnny Depp, ripping off the mild Scottish accent Robin Williams used in Mrs. Doubtfire) begins his famous relationship with Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet) and her children (played by a gaggle of Brit brats with charmingly cute accents). Barrie is just coming off a poorly received play, to the displeasure of his producer (Dustin Hoffman, on hand mainly because he played the title role in Steven Spielberg’s Peter Pan-inspired Hook).

Normally the disgruntled producer would be one of the bad guys, but Hoffman never registers more than mild displeasure, and he obviously comes around when the notices for Peter Pan come rolling in. Come to think of it, the only characters remotely resembling villains in the film are Sylvia’s controlling mother (Julie Christie), and a few clucking spinsters who dip their crumpets in tea while speculating about the true nature of Barrie’s affinity for Sylvia—or worse yet, for the kids.

But if Barrie was the Michael Jackson of his generation, the film never allows even the barest whiff of scandal (or, for that matter, some of the more inconvenient historical details) to ruin the whimsical mood. And this whimsy is where Finding Neverland finds the heart that keeps its niceness from becoming dullness. Director Marc Forster (whose last film was 2001’s Monster’s Ball) uses the magic of cinematography to show us the fantastic things that are seemingly always going on in Barrie’s head. Although many of these scenes are directly linked to Barrie’s growing inspiration for his new play, it’s the less obvious ones that stand out. (In one of the more memorable of these unobtrusive little moments, Barrie and his increasingly frustrated wife head off to separate rooms. Her door opens on an empty bedroom; his opens on a bright blue sky.)

The real J. M. Barrie’s own words, taken directly from Peter Pan and used in several scenes showing the play in progress, finish the job of drawing us into Barrie’s wondrous world. By the end of the film, the point is clear: Peter Pan may have been named after Peter Llewelyn Davies, but the real boy who never grew up was Barrie himself.

***~ (3/4)

The premises of the two films are very, very similar. Kids get left alone in big house, kids find old board game stashed away, kids play board game, all hell breaks loose when the game spills over into reality. But in this case, it’s not the perils of darkest Africa the kids unleash on themselves; it’s the perils of darkest space. Meteor showers! Aliens! Stranded astronauts! Ruined furniture! As you might expect, the film also sneaks in some of the perils of sibling rivalry. And even more than superior special effects, the superior handling of the relationship between the kids is what distinguishes Zathura from its ten-year-old predecessor.

In the film, the kids in question are six-and-three-quarters-year-old Danny (Jonah Bobo) and his 10-year-old brother Walter (Josh Hutcherson). Walter treats his little brother exactly like I treated my little brother in our youth: as badly as possible without actually killing him. (One of the best things about this film is how genuinely unlikeable Walter is for most of the way; it’s a great lesson for every older brother who’s still kicking the crap out his of weaker sibling just because he can.)

The film keeps the focus tight on the two boys throughout. It wastes no time getting their father (Tim Robbins) out of the house; we never actually see their mother. There is a teen sister (played by Kristen Stewart), but her presence hardly matters. In fact, she spends a good deal of the time cryonically frozen in the bathroom after one of the boys has an unlucky turn in the game. The only adult on hand is a twentysomething astronaut (Dax Shepard), who helps the boys out after they rescue him early in the game.

The game itself works a lot like the eponymous board game from Jumanji. Each player takes a turn—a nice touch is that the game will only work for the player whose turn it is, thus ensuring fairness—and waits to see what the hell will happen. And in a game that can uproot your entire house and transplant it into the middle of the galaxy, anything can happen.

A lot of things happen—which gives the effects crew a chance to show how far computer imagery has come since Jumanji’s poorly rendered monkeys. The effects have an appealing retro-futuristic feel inspired by things like the 1960s version of Lost in Space and the 1930s Flash Gordon serials. There are rocket ships with big single engines at the back, and a giant robot with visible gears, metal antennae sticking out of its head, and a booming voice that keeps saying “Emergency! Emergency!”

Zathura is a pleasant surprise from start to finish. Director Jon Favreau (yes, that Jon Favreau) could have made a lazy, effects-ridden rehash—the equivalent of a played-out board game. But instead, he goes to the trouble of doing two things right: he makes the central relationship matter, and he makes the action matter to that relationship. The result is a movie worth taking your kids to see—even if you don’t have kids.

***~ (3/4)

In fact, any resemblance to the Universal films is strictly limited to the black-and-white opening sequence, in which Frankenstein brings his creation to life while angry villagers storm his castle. Oh, there are plenty of other allusions thrown in haphazardly throughout the film—including The Wolf Man’s oft-quoted “wolfsbane” poem—but they stand out so glaringly as allusions that their only purpose is to give horror hipsters something to alleviate the boredom every now and then.

When we first meet the title character, he’s just tracked down a ludicrous computer-generated Mr. Hyde that looks like a casting reject from Shrek. This isn’t the professorial Van Helsing familiar to readers of Bram Stoker’s Dracula; instead, it’s X-Men star Hugh Jackman with a long leather coat, a sour disposition and a Vatican-issued license to kill iconic movie monsters. Van Helsing’s problem is that every time he kills another monster, he also kills the human alter ego—a fact that doesn’t sit well with either his conscience or the general public.

With a name like Van Helsing, you know it won’t be long before he’s dispatched to Transylvania. There he runs into Anna Valerious (Underworld vixen Kate Beckinsale), who along with her brother is the last descendant of a hero who had faced Dracula centuries earlier. The two then try to sort out the mystery of Dracula’s weakness during the brief moments when they aren’t engaging in what the MPAA likes to call “stylized action violence.”

It’s probably useless to hope for great villains in something this dumb, but Van Helsing fails to provide even good ones. Richard Roxburgh’s Dracula is an ill-advised nod to Udo Kier in Blood for Dracula, and the computer-animated Wolf Man is never remotely convincing. Dracula’s three “brides” are on hand, but they spend most of the time as blue harpies who launch air strikes on Anna’s small village while shrieking the worst Transylvanian dialogue since Count Chocula. The only performance worth mentioning is that of Shuler Hensley, who somehow salvages scraps of the Frankenstein monster’s antiheroic pathos out of the wreckage.

All of this campy crapola might have worked if Sommers were capable of bringing any sort of postmodern originality to the monster-movie genre (in the way that Baz Luhrmann, for example, has done with the musical). Unfortunately, Sommers has the storytelling skill of a seven-year-old, and the influences to match. The tedious effects-ridden mayhem owes a lot more to the Castlevania videogame series than it does to anything starring Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff.

But what really hurts this film isn’t Sommers’ choice of influences; it’s the way he tries to showcase all of them at once. Heedless of trifling matters like plot incoherence and anachronism, he clogs the film with everything from the egg chamber in Alien to Bond-esque gadgetry. (Van Helsing’s monkish sidekick supplies him with such common nineteenth-century weaponry as spinning saw blades and a fully automatic crossbow.) At no time does Sommers ever provide anything remotely interesting, except a vague sense of wonder that three films as good as those Universal classics could inspire something as bad as this.

*~~~ (1/4)

Things have a way of not sticking in people’s minds in the film. Julianne Moore plays Telly Paretta, a mother who still can’t get over her young son’s death in a plane crash 14 months earlier. What’s strange about the situation isn’t that she’s been grieving for so long; it’s that everyone around her—including her therapist (Gary Sinise) and even her husband (Anthony Edwards)—keeps insisting that she never had a son.

Moore’s performance in the early scenes is a kind of is-she-crazy-or-isn’t-she balancing act that makes the first half-hour subtler and more suspenseful than anything that follows. (The ambiguity is heightened by smart cinematography; Telly’s memories of her son are rendered in vivid sunlit colours that appear more real than the bleak, washed-out hues of her present.) Later on, Moore slips into a more routine groove as her character teams up with a fellow bereaved parent (played by Dominic West) to figure out why nobody else remembers their kids—and why the NSA has taken such an interest in apprehending them.

Their investigation eventually takes them into X-Files territory, and that’s where the film really begins to deteriorate. Director Joseph Ruben, whose previous efforts include other middling thrillers like The Good Son and Sleeping With the Enemy, is obviously trying for a stylistic impression of M. Night Shyamalan. He has good reasons to do this: for one thing, Shyamalan is good at concealing preposterous plot points with understated acting and layers of atmosphere. But Ruben’s attempt is too obvious; the deliberately muted tone, the sudden unexpected moments, and the whispered would-be catchphrase lines (”They’re listening”) are all stuff we’ve seen Shyamalan do better. What Ruben does imitate perfectly, however, is Shyamalan’s post-Sixth Sense tendency not to follow through on a great premise. Like Shyamalan’s Signs (and his more recent The Village), The Forgotten makes for a curiosity-arousing trailer, but fails to deliver on its promises.

On a final note, this might be the first film ever in which characters who have outlived their usefulness literally vanish into thin air before your eyes. The suddenness and swiftness with which this happens makes it easy to overlook how silly it is—at least the first time it happens. On the other hand, it’s also probably the only thing I’ll remember about this film by next week.

**~~ (2/4)