The White Ribbon

Starring: Review: Don't let anyone tell you too much about this spellbinder from Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke (Caché). Shot in stunning black-and-white by the gifted Christian Berger, The White Ribbon is a toxic blossom of images that burn into your memory. In pre-World War I Germany, a farm village is beset by accidents that may not be accidents. The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) dominates the village economy, just as the Pastor (Burghart Klaussner) holds brutal sway over the morality of the villagers and their families. It's on the faces of the children that Haneke tells his story of corruption and the grip of fascism. This haunting film never pushes itself on you. It trusts you to suss out the horror that lies beneath the veneer of innocence. You'll be knocked for a loop. Rating: 3.5 Stars

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

Starring: Heath Ledger Review: Heath Ledger's last screen performance, a remarkable one interrupted by his tragic death at age 28 in 2008, comes wrapped in the kind of passionate provocation of a movie that the Aussie actor favored. ( Peter Travers reviews The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus in his weekly video podcast, "At the Movies with Peter Travers.") Terry Gilliam, the mad visionary behind Brazil, Time Bandits and Monty Python, was ready to scrap the film after the passing of Ledger, who had filmed only the London scenes. As the movie was conceived, Ledger's con man, Tony, would join the traveling horse-drawn caravan of Dr. Parnassus (a terrific Christopher Plummer) and lead customers behind a mirror to a parallel world of computer-generated fantasy. What saved the film was Gilliam's decision to call on three of... Rating: 3 Stars

Sherlock Holmes

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams Review: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never imagined his cerebral London detective as a ball-busting action hero. But director Guy Ritchie did. And he's persuaded Robert Downey Jr. to mainline testosterone. You never saw Basil Rathbone, the best movie Holmes, or Jeremy Brett, the best TV Holmes, strip down in a freestyle-fight ring. You do here. Even old Dr. Watson is a scrapper in the studly person of Jude Law. Ritchie directs with the kind of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels gusto that's meant to batter you into submission. Peter Travers reviews Sherlock Holmes in his weekly video podcast, "At the Movies with Peter Travers." The time is 1891, and the place is still London, but Ritchie can't be bothered with period details, especially dialogue. Noticing that the villainous Lord Blackwood (Mark... Rating: 2 Stars

It's Complicated

Starring: Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin Review: People over 50 talking about sex and — yikes! — having it! Welcome to It's Complicated, a romcom that qualifies as a waking nightmare for teens and infantile men whose definition of "hot" hovers around jailbait. Screw them. ( Peter Travers reviews It's Complicated in his weekly video podcast, "At the Movies with Peter Travers.") In this unapologetic chick flick from writer-director Nancy Meyers — she profitably reinvented the genre with What Women Want and Something's Gotta Give — Meryl Streep plays a divorced mother of three grown children who winds up slutting around with the rat bastard (Alec Baldwin) who divorced her for a younger model (Lake Bell). Streep even has an amiable architect (Steve Martin) sniffing after her. Meyers panders to another popular fem... Rating: 2.5 Stars

Avatar

Starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana Review: Oscar can relax. The epic crowd-pleaser the Academy lusted for is here, the one to show that the geezer voters are hip to what the kids want (3-D IMAX) and what the industry needs (the kind of wowser you'll pay to see on a big screen). James Cameron's tone-deaf but thunderously exciting Avatar, costing a record $300 million, is just the thing to pump box-office blood into Oscar's idiotically expanded Best Picture category (10 nominees instead of the usual five). Nevermind my preference for the life-sized likes of Precious, The Hurt Locker, Up in the Air and An Education. They look puny next to the computerized giants at play in the fields of Lord Cameron. Unlike hack-of-the-decade Michael Bay, who can transform anything into instant stupid, Cameron knows how to harness technology... Rating: 3.5 Stars

Nine

Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman Review: Rob Marshall's flawed but frequently dazzling Nine is a hot-blooded musical fantasia full of song, dance, raging emotion and simmering sexuality. We get to watch British acting dynamo Daniel Day-Lewis be Italian as Guido Contini, a genius director of the swinging Sixties (ciao, Federico Fellini) struggling to put the movie in his head up on the screen. That movie concerns the women in his life — mother (Sophia Loren), wife (Marion Cotillard), muse (Nicole Kidman), mistress (Penélope Cruz), reporter (Kate Hudson), colleague (Judi Dench) and whore (Fergie). With an indisputably gifted actor playing ringmaster to such feminine life force, what's not to like? You could argue that Nine, a 1982 Broadway hit spun off from Fellini's own 1963 psychodrama, 8 1/2, and revived in 2003, was... Rating: 3 Stars

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