At the movies: Carnage.

New Polanski, in this case a tony theatrical adaptation. And believe you me, it's something very special. I guarantee you Green Hills crowds can relate to it.

At the movies: Contagion.

You've already been exposed. To the advertising campaign. Which is effective. like the movie.

At the movies: Revolutionary Road.

Kate and Leo, back again!

Kate working, for the first time, onscreen with her husband, director Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition)!

A classic American novel served up raw and bloody for a nation coming to terms with its own legacy of expectations!

It's as refined a recipe for Oscar bait as anyone could hope for. Based on the acclaimed novel of suburban secrets and '50s frustration, Revolutionary Road reunites Titanic costars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio as April and Frank Wheeler, who've found each other, suburban bliss is picturesque Connecticut, and a near-bottomless well of seething resentment from which to draw all sorts of hurtful and destructive acts.

Adultery, secret abortions, and using the children as pawns are just the starter course for this feast of misery. Revolutionary Road aims big; not only an indictment of domestic culture in the 50s, but also an attack on the Age of Titanic. It's no iceberg that tears apart our notion of idyllic cinematic love this time, but rather alienation, resentment, and even-then antiquated gender roles.

Sadly, it's such an unpleasant experience that it dilutes its own anger and frustration, and only Michael Shannon (Bug, Let's Go To Prison), as ECT survivor and ideological loose cannon John Givings, breaks through and detonates the film's hermetically sealed interiors from within in his two scenes. His is the voice that remains long after the film has ended. His are the words that define what
we've witnessed.

At the movies: The Reader.

In 1958, when Michael Berg was fifteen, he had a brief but passionate affair with an older woman whose only demand was that he read to her before they made love. Less than a decade later and now a law student, Michael finds that his onetime lover is on trial for war crimes and that she had been a guard at Auschwitz. Much angst and soul searching ensues.

As do questions of atonement, forgiveness, and misplaced erotic longing. So we've got a big budget film that gets into some very provocative moral questions, as well as an effort with several jaw-dropping change-ups throughout its runtime. As an erotic coming-of-age tale, a legal procedural, a testament to the shame of illiteracy, and as an illustration of Hannah Arendt's concept of the banality of evil, The Reader tries to be all things to all people, which is impossible.

As a provocative film about moral responsibility and how decisions can reverberate throughout our lives, The Reader is fairly successful and genuinely unsettling, and its central performances are effective and useful.