Stieg Larsson’s posthumous Millennium Trilogy continues to top the New York Times’ bestseller lists, and Music Box Films is taking full and fast advantage by getting the Swedish film adaptations of the books to America as quickly as possible: The second film, The Girl Who Played With Fire, is entering theaters as the first, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo—also still in theaters—comes out on DVD. (The third movie hits America in October.) For people curious about the phenomenon but not eager to wade through hundreds of pages of exposition and description, Dragon Tattoo the film serves as a streamlined but faithful adaptation that keeps all the lurid intensity (and graphic, grotesque exploitation) of the original murder mystery, and finds a perfect lead in the mesmerizing Noomi Rapace…
Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man (Sony) features impeccable production design, a stellar cast led by Colin Firth, and many extremely powerful moments. So why does it fall short of greatness and land in the “very good” category? Tough to say, but it’s still worth a look, and we expect great things to come from the fashion-designer-turned-rookie-director…
Antoine Fuqua’s maddeningly generic police thriller Brooklyn’s Finest (Overture) gathers an all-star aggregation of morally ambiguous cop-movie all-stars (Traitor’s Don Cheadle, Training Day’s Ethan Hawke, Sea Of Love’s Ellen Barkin, New Jack City’s Wesley Snipes, and Internal Affairs’ Richard Gere) for a perfectly adequate ensemble drama about conflicted cops and charismatic criminals. You can find more scintillating police drama every night on Law & Order reruns.