Frédérik Sisa

Like a “Requiem for a Dream” for marital breakdowns, “Revolutionary Road” is relentlessly downward, inexorable and bleak. It’s an antidote, if a cure is actually needed, for all those romances in which a glance exchanged across a crowded room leads to wishful thinking and everlasting post-credit happiness.

On May 17, 1968, during the latter half of the Vietnam War, nine Catholic anti-war activists broke into the offices of the Selective Service in Catonsville, MD, removed hundreds of draft files, and took them to the street where they poured homemade napalm and set the whole lot on fire. They were subsequently arrested, tried, and convicted of destroying U.S. property and interfering with the Selective Service Act of 1967. One of the nine, Father Daniel Berrigan, dramatized the trial as The Trial of the Catonsville Nine.

Capitalism as we know it is bad for the economy. Yes, it’s more successful than communism. And yes, there are obvious benefits – stocks and bonds are useful instruments to fund risky endeavours. But there is something profoundly wrong with an economic system that is also prone to catastrophic failure...

Henry Selick’s role in ushering what may described as the modern age of stop-motion animation – counter-programming to the glut of CGI films – naturally sets up a certain kind of expectation for this latest dark fantasy tale of children in peril. Artistically, Selick delivers.

Bankers, bankers, everywhere. Tykwer brings the paranoid in this tightly-directed return to the old-school conspiracy thriller set amidst the stunning modern architecture of buildings by Zaha Hadid and Daniel Liebeskind, but is it really paranoia when the premise hews so close, “Law & Order” style, to the headlines?

The economy is like the ocean – beautiful in its bounty, terrifying in its temper and more fickle than the media in its love affair with politicians and celebrities. And with all the fancy-pants – you know, the ones who can explain things like why swaps have legs – setting up a nice crossfire of advice, recommendations and dire warnings of doom, it’s time for yet another monkey with a keyboard to offer some thoughts. So this week I give you…Frédérik’s Guide to Giving Good Stimulus (to an Economy That Needs It).

The film adaptation of Cornelia Funke's “Inkheart” thrills with visuals, adventure, and superb casting, but also lacks the animating force that gives a story its heart.

What do you call it when a couple has one child? Sensible.

What do you call it when a couple has two children? Understandable. Three kids gets to be a little antisocial.

Which means that the woman who gave birth to octuplets (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090130/ap_on_re_us/octuplets), after already having given birth to six children, isn’t only antisocial but downright misanthropic.

Movies about World War II and the Holocaust tend to tack in one of several familiar directions – the somber “we shall never forget” elegy, the flower of hope from the ashes of horror tale of overcoming, the exploitative thriller with Nazis providing a ready shorthand for evil. (Here’s a fun storytelling trick: add an extra splash of evil to an archetypal villain by adding a “Nazi” prefix. If your zombies are too tame, make them Nazi zombies. Lycanthropes lacking bite? SS Werewolves! Scientist not mad enough? Nazi doctors!) But “The Reader,” based on the book by Bernhard Schlink, begins by assuming that we are already properly filled with historical acumen and moral outrage then shakes preconceived notions of responsibility, guilt and justice by deploying Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil filtered through the Stanford Prison experiment and Stanley Milgram’s experiment in obedience. No heavy hand of history here; this is strictly character study material, beautifully delivered by director Stephen Daldry from a marvelously literate script by David Hare.

I know a thing or two about inflicting pain. No, no, I wasn’t a junior torture-cadet at Abu Ghraib. I did, however, study Kung Fu for a few years, which isn’t to say I learned about torturing people – martial arts aren’t about that, and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t know Kung Fu from noodles – but that part of defending oneself involves knowing how to neutralize an opponent quickly and effectively. Sometimes that involves pain, whether through a strike, a joint lock, or a pressure point attack.