Prisoners (***1/4)

This suspense drama deals with missing children, an angry father (Hugh Jackman) determined to get them back, and a possible suspect (Paul Dano) who appears to be simple but may know more than he’s letting on. In other words, it has all the ingredients of a shitty revenge flick, or a Death Wish remake. But it isn’t.

It’s a December day in Pennsylvania when two little girls go missing. (Maria Bello plays Jackman’s wife, and Terrence Howard and Viola Davis play the parents of one of the girls.) A police detective who’s solved all his cases (Jake Gyllenhaal) and a seemingly obvious perpetrator (Dano) suggest that the crime will be solved quickly. But the expected forensic evidence doesn’t implicate the suspect. And the detective’s discovery of a old man’s body in a cellar suggests a more complicated scenario.

As he did in he previous feature, Incendies, director Denis Villeneuve contructs the story like a puzzle and makes the quasi-suburban nowhere-ness of the setting seem as memorable as he did the  Middle Eastern desert in his previous film.  The script is by Aaron Guzikowski (Contraband).

There is some violence in the movie, but it is not cathartic. It is difficult, and the movie makes you feel conflicted and a little creepy. Nearly all the characters have moral uncertainty. It’s so well put together that I didn’t mind so much that the explanation for what happened is extremely far-fetched.

IMDb link

Flightplan (***1/4)

Jodie Foster’s first starring role since Panic Room (2002) finds her playing another single mother with a child in jeopardy in a confined space. Having been just widowed, she’s taking her six-year-old on a Berlin-New York flight. When she wakes from a nap, the child is gone. This has gotten mixed reviews, with many of the bad ones focusing on the admittedly weak resolution of the plot. It's definitely unlikely, but not actually nonsensical, as with the season’s other airliner thriller, Red Eye. The thing that I found compelling was the sense of isolation the film conveys. The airplane is one of the film’s more interesting fictions, an ultramodern megaplane with two levels of seating. The first time we see its inside is a memorable shot of the identical monitors at each seat that conveys both modernity and impersonality. I thought the portrayal of both the mother's increasingly frantic reaction and the flight crew’s professional-yet-detached response was realistic. So even if it nearly crashes and burns at the end, I thought it was worth a look. For whatever it’s worth, there was actually a significant smattering of applause from the audience I watched it with.

IMDb link

circulated via email 9/29/05 and posted 11/18/13