It probably isn't right to call Martin Scorsese's The Departed (Warner Bros.) a comeback, because he never really went away, but his return to the crime genre may be his most assured and thrilling work since GoodFellas. Though it grapples with a host of his pet themes, this remake of the Hong Kong staple Infernal Affairs appeals more to the gut than the head, but here's a case where the filmmaking itself is so invigorating that it's its own justification…
Practically a case study in how excellent acting and understated direction can make any film rise above its material, Half Nelson (Sony) features an overwrought-sounding yet low-incident plot in which inner-city high-school student Shareeka Epps catches inspirational teacher Ryan Gosling smoking crack, and the two of them form a quiet bond. Little else happens, but their unshowy performances and the way director Ryan Fleck catches the grubby details of their lives winds up being mesmerizing…
Whatever people expected of Sofia Coppola's biopic Marie Antoinette (Sony), it's a fair bet that most weren't counting on long scenes of people eating state dinners in stony silence, instead of bloody scenes of royal beheadings. But while Coppola is kind of a cold fish as a filmmaker, and not especially deep, there's something striking about the way she combines luxe imagery, dreamy pop, and thick-walled monuments with her own "daughter of privilege" anxieties. She keeps Marie Antoinette brisk and fairly funny, packed with scenes that coalesce between the screen and the viewer, like the best Impressionist art…
Cursed by coming second in the Truman Capote sweepstakes, Infamous (Warner Bros.) performed dismally at the box office, thanks to middling reviews and the fact that viewers got all they needed about the making of In Cold Blood from Capote a mere year ago. But the film deserves a second look on DVD, if only to see how differently two movies can approach the same material. Nearly every performance in Infamous falls short of the comparable ones in Capote, but Toby Jones does bear an uncanny resemblance to the author, and the film's breezy fish-out-of-water approach makes it the funnier and more approachable of the two.