Doubt (15)
With an all star cast featuring Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, an excellent trailer, and a hefty Oscar nominations, I was expecting Doubt to be a film highlight. The story is set in the early 1960s, at a religios preparatory school run by severe sister Aloysius (Streep). A sermon given by the new priest, Father Brendan Flynn (Hoffman) is on doubt - and it causes just that. The mystery of the film is whether or not Flynn is guilty of taking advantage of an altar boy. It is hard to write about this film without favouring one side, and by revealing my own interpretations of the film-it would stop your own forming, but perhaps that's the point. Throughout the film you begin to doubt yourself, and your own reasoning, and question what you have just seen - I would love to go through the film again with a fine comb!
The tone, dialogue and acting are all superb and visually, it fits well into the current Oscar film look (e.g. Tale of Benjamin Button, the Reader, Changeling). Definately watchable but lacking a certain something to make it a wow.
Revolutionary Road (15)
The first I heard of his film was that Kate Winslet had won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in it, so knowing nothing of the story, the author and it's almost cult-ish following, I went to see it. Reunited for the first time since Titanic, Winslet starts with Leonardo DiCaprio playing disfunctional married couple The Wheelers. Their lives are filled with unhappiness and emptiness in their perfect house, in the good part of town, and in their unfufilling jobs. They feel like big fish in a small pond they didn't even want to be in, and after two children, nothing has changed. Determined to change, they plan to emigrate to Paris - to run away, to change things, and to have a better life. But things don't turn out the way people plan them. Brilliant story, incredible acting, definately Golden Globe (and hopefully Oscar) worthy.
