Limited Release: Changeling, Passengers, Synecdoche, I’ve Loved You So Long

Changeling
Clint Eastwood returns for another Oscar season with Changeling, the dramatic story of one woman’s grueling efforts to stand up to corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department of the 1920s. Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a woman who begins to question the LAPD once her abducted son is supposedly returned to her, even though she doesn’t seem to recognize the boy as her own. Her continuing struggle to convince them they’ve found the wrong boy are met with a stonewall from LAPD Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice) and eventually they get her committed to a psychiatric ward. Yet with the help of Reverend Briegleb (John Malkovich), her fight against corruption continues onward.

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Passengers
It’s not quite the same as her Oscar buzz performance in Rachel Getting Married, but this film sees Anne Hathaway helping Lakeview Terrace star Patrick Wilson get prepared for playing in the world of superpowers as he will when he’s featured as Nite Owl in Watchmen. Rodrigo Garcia’s thriller looks to combine the superhuman mysteriousness of Heroes with the plane-crashy mysteriousness of Lost, in that Wilson plays a man who lives through a plane crash and becomes mysteriously superhuman. Hathaway is the grief counselor assigned to help the survivors, only to become mysteriously drawn to Wilson, the quietest one, to the point where she breaches her ethics to make out with him several times in the trailer. What are his powers? What really happened when that plane crashed? How did anybody survive? What is his true goal? When does Watchmen come out?

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***

Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Kaufman is known for his challengingly original Oscar-nominated screenplays. Now he’s stepping into the director’s chair with a strange film called Synecdoche, New York. That’s sin-ECK-do-key, which is a play on the real town of Schenectady, New York. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as a theater director by the name of Caden Cotard, who has come to Broadway after succeeding in regional theater in Schenectady. He’s working on his soulful and brutally realistic masterpiece, which involves gathering a cast of actors and having them live artificial versions of real lives inside a Manhattan warehouse, which contains a miniature mockup of the city outside. While the fictionalized version of his life plays out, his real life begins to unravel until the lines between reality and artifice are blurred, which is a concept Kaufman loves to explore in his work. It features a great cast (Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Dianne Wiest and Tom Noonan), but it is not an easily explainable film. It just needs to be seen.

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***

I’ve Loved You So Long
Where has Kristin Scott Thomas been, you may ask? She was nominated for an Oscar for The English Patient in 1997, she was in the Oscar-nominated Gosford Park in 2001, but we haven’t seen much of her. Aside from an appearance earlier this year in The Other Boleyn Girl, her profile hasn’t been very high lately. However, she’s currently married to a French guy and by now she’s lived in France longer than she ever lived in England, her nation of birth, so it’s no surprise that she’s taking roles in French films instead - such as this summer’s surprise art house hit Tell No One and now in this Philippe Claudel film. Scott plays Juliette, a doctor who is just leaving prison after serving a 15-year sentence after being convicted of murdering her six-year-old son. Her much younger sister Lea (Elsa Zylberstein) takes her in and is determined to forge a bond with her sibling, who is as much a stranger to her as anyone else, although Lea’s husband (Serge Hazanavicius) is somewhat hostile to the idea. Slowly and with much hardship, Juliette begins to rejoin the world around her, but mysteries still remain to be solved.

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***

Fear(s) of the Dark
A terrifying collection of starkly black-and-white animated films from six renowned graphic artists and cartoonists, exploring the world of phobias, nightmares and intense horrors just in time to freak you out for Halloween.

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