Movies

Juno

• Director: Jason Reitman
• Cast: Ellen Page, Michael Cera, Olivia Thirlby, Jennifer Garner
• Rating: PG-13 (Adult Situations/Profanity/Sexual Situations)

Juno MacGuff, the title character of Jason Reitman's new film, is 16 and pregnant, but "Juno" could not be further from the kind of hand-wringing, moralizing melodrama that such a condition might suggest. Juno, played by the poised, frighteningly talented Ellen Page, is too odd and too smart to be either a case study or the object of leering disapproval. She assesses her problem, and weighs her response to it, with disconcerting sang-froid. It's not that Juno treats her pregnancy as a joke, but rather that in the sardonic spirit of the screenwriter, Diablo Cody, she can't help finding humor in it. Tiny of frame and huge of belly, Juno utters wisecracks as if they were breathing exercises, referring to herself as "the cautionary whale." At first her sarcasm is bracing and also a bit jarring ‹ "Hello, I'd like to procure a hasty abortion," she says when she calls a women's health clinic ‹ but as "Juno" follows her from pregnancy test to delivery room (and hastily retreats from the prospect of abortion), it takes on surprising delicacy and emotional depth. The snappy one-liners are a brilliant distraction, Ms. Cody's way of clearing your throat for the lump you're likely to find there in the movie's last scenes.¹

Persepolis

• Director: Marjane Satrapi
• Cast: Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux
• Rating: PG-13 (Violence/Adult Situations/Profanity/Sexual Situations/Drug Content)

"Persepolis" is a simple story told by simple means. Like Marjane Satrapi's book, on which it is based, the film, directed by Ms. Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, consists essentially of a series of monochrome drawings, their bold black lines washed with nuances of gray. The pictures are arranged into the chronicle of a young girl's coming of age in difficult times, a tale that unfolds with such grace, intelligence and charm that you almost take the wondrous aspects of its execution for granted. In this age of Pixar and "Shrek," it is good to be reminded that animation is rooted not in any particular technique, but in the impulse to bring static images to life. And "Persepolis," austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit. Its flat, stylized depiction of the world ‹ the streets and buildings of Tehran and Vienna in particular ‹ turns geography into poetry. If "Persepolis" had been a conventional memoir rather than a graphic novel, Ms. Satrapi's account of her youth in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran would not have been quite as moving or as marvelous. Similarly, if the movie version had been conventionally cast and acted, it would inevitably have seemed less magical as well as less real.¹

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

• Director: Tim Burton
• Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen, Alan Rickman
• Rating: R (Graphic Violence)

Tim Burton makes fantasy movies. Stephen Sondheim writes musicals. It is hard to think of two more optimistic genres of popular art, or of two popular artists who have so systematically subverted that optimism. Mr. Sondheim has always gravitated toward the dissonance lurking in hummable tunes, and has threaded his song-and-dance spectaculars with subtexts of anxiety and alienation. Mr. Burton, for his part, dwells most naturally (if somewhat uneasily) in the realms of the gothic and the grotesque, turning comic books and children's tales into scary, nightmarish shadow plays. And so it should not be surprising that "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street," Mr. Burton's film adaptation of Mr. Sondheim's musical, is as dark and terrifying as any motion picture in recent memory, not excluding the bloody installments in the "Saw" franchise. Indeed, "Sweeney" is as much a horror film as a musical: It is cruel in its effects and radical in its misanthropy, expressing a breathtakingly, rigorously pessimistic view of human nature. It is also something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme - I am tempted to say evil - genius.¹

There Will Be Blood (2007)

• Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
• Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Mary Elizabeth Barrett, Paul Dano, Dillon Freasier
• Rating: R (Violence)

"There Will Be Blood," Paul Thomas Anderson's epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportions - reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism - which Mr. Anderson has mined from Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel "Oil!" There is no God but money in this oil-rich desert and his messenger is Daniel Plainview, a petroleum speculator played by a monstrous and shattering Daniel Day-Lewis. "There Will Be Blood" involves a tangle of relationships, mainly intersecting sets of fathers and sons and pairs of brothers. (Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. Anderson makes little on-screen time for women.) But it is Plainview's intense, needful bond with H. W. that raises the stakes and gives enormous emotional force to this expansively imagined period story with its pictorial and historical sweep, its raging fires, geysers of oil and inevitable blood. (Rarely has a film's title seemed so ominous.)¹

1. All movie images and graphics from the NY Times web site at: http://movies.nytimes.com/pages/movies/index.html