"Precious" has no bounds. It's a disturbing, overwhelming story of one Harlem girl's merciless degradations. An overwhelming, masterful dramatic competition entrant, this Lee Daniels film may have no bounds in the awards categories here at Sundance. It would not be surprising to see "Precious" pull in both the Audience Award and Jury Award.

It's a hard-forged film with a story line so grim and abhorrent -- a 16-year-old black girl has been impregnated twice by her father -- that marketing will be tough. However, the film's crystalline performances, including a bravura performance from Mo'Nique, should propel word-of-mouth. Solid supporting turns from Mariah Carey, Paula Patton and Lenny Kravitz will also help commercially.

In this inner-city horror story, newcomer Gabourey Sidibe plays Clarice, a pathetic ghetto girl enduring more personal plagues than Job. Called "Precious," she's illiterate, overweight and emotionally abused by her deadbeat mother (Mo'Nique). Slow in school, Precious wallows in junior high at 16 and is shuffled through the system to a "special" program.

Shoving her boxcar frame into the bleak makeshift classroom, Precious confronts the first ray of help in her life, a charismatic teacher called Blu Rain (Paula Patton). With Blu Rain's feisty prodding, Precious slogs toward her GED.

Precious sustains herself through intermittent fantasies. She envisions herself as the worshipful object of mass media's most vapid idealizations: a red-carpet superstar and, most shockingly, a blonde-haired/blue-eyed white beauty queen. That weird warp is darkly ironic; from the outside it seems the ultimate degradation to Precious. Yet, those oddly inspired flights are the sole windows of self-esteem and sustenance for this degraded girl.

Damien Paul's edgy and effervescent screenplay propels us into the inner recesses of primitive survival. It's a magnificent distillation, both succinct and eruptive. Director Lee Daniels sagely navigates the story from Precious' cavernous inner world through her synaptic flashes of fantasy that momentarily allow her to transcend her personal hell.

As Precious, Sidibe is superb, allowing us to see the inner warmth and beauty of a young woman who, to her world's cruel eyes, might seem monstrous. As Precious' hideous mother, Mo'Nique is cruelty incarnate. It's an astonishingly powerful performance.

In a striking non-star turn, Mariah Carey is credible as a veteran social worker who is jarred by Precious' plight. As the effervescent school teacher, Paula Patton exudes goodness but sagely reveals her character's inner liabilities, while Lenny Kravitz is low-key perfect as an empathetic nurse's aide.

Under Lee Daniels' radiant hand, technical contributions are magnificently forged. Highest praise to cinematographer Andrew Dunn for the gothic compositions and editor Joe Klotz for the kinetic cuts.

By Duane Byrge

Anger, rebellion, romance and despair are the keynotes of this freewheeling if self-conscious picture from the Mexican director Gerardo Naranjo.

Juan ­Pablo de Santiago and Maria ­Deschamps play two 15-year-olds, Román and Maru. Drawn to each other by their alienation from their family and loathing of school, they go on the run. Román's father is a high-up politician and widower, played by Daniel Giménez Cacho, whom his son blames for the death of his mother in a car ­accident – Maru's family are less well-off.

The pair escape, but Román shrewdly senses that his father will not wish to call the police, for fear of bad press, and also that the best place for them to hide is on the roof of the family home. Not only is it the last place they would think of looking, but he has spent his life "hiding" there anyway, being ignored by a thoughtless father. ­Concealing himself will mean only a small change to his normal lifestyle.

Intriguingly, the lovers spy on their parents at nerve-rendingly close quarters, and Román sees how his dad is more concerned about his clandestine bets on a football match that appears to be rigged. Together, Román and Maru crouch behind the sofa and watch as the adults watch a therapeutic video for parents whose kids have run away – his father wants to watch the football. A little overheated, this, but well acted by De Santiago and Deschamps.

By Peter Bradshaw

Taking on his first lead role since 2002's "Signs," Mel Gibson returns to form in "Edge of Darkness" as an agonized homicide detective determined to avenge the murder of his only daughter, uncovering corporate corruption and political conspiracy in the process.

If the subject matter seems familiar, it's likely because director Martin Campbell has returned to the scene of his highly regarded 1985 British miniseries of the same name, to largely explosive effect.

Whether the performance will deliver Gibson boxoffice redemption in the wake of his well-known personal issues will have more to do with audience response to the violent film's dark subject matter.

But at this juncture, the choice of vehicle would seen to be a smarter fit than, say, a frothy romantic comedy.

Relocating from the original Yorkshire to Boston, the film's focus remains essentially the same, centering on Gibson's Thomas Craven, a career cop whose adult daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic), is gunned down on the front steps of his home.

Driven by grief and guilt, believing that he was the intended target, Craven stops at nothing to track down her killer, but along the way he uncovers disturbing truths about her job at a top security-research compound with shadowy ties to the government.

Condensing a six-hour TV serial and turning it into a contemporary two-hour feature can be a tricky bit of business, as the makers of last year's "State of Play" discovered.
Screenwriters William Monahan ("The Departed") and Andrew Bovell ("Lantana") come close to pulling it off.

Although it has retained much of its grit and intrigue, bringing the original Troy Kennedy Martin script up to speed from its original mid-'80s nuclear-arms race context is another matter. Their attempts to update the political agenda result in a scenario that comes off a tad far-fetched where its villains are concerned.

But in between the two "Edge of Darkness" assignments, director Campbell did a couple of Bond pictures -- most notably "Casino Royale" -- and that raw, sinewy energy comes very much into play here.

He also has the ideal protagonist in Gibson's equally raw portrayal of a man with nothing left to lose, though his startlingly craggy appearance admittedly requires a few minutes of adjustment.

Also sturdy are the supporting players, particularly Ray Winstone as a quietly threatening government op with a license to clean up potential messes and Danny Huston as a nefarious corporate head honcho.

Technical assist is first class all the way, from Phil Meheux's evocatively murky cinematography to Stuart Baird's cut-to-the-chase editing and Howard Shore's edgy score.

By Michael Rechtshaffen

A great deal has happened in the 70 years since the inspirational Warner Brothers biopics of the 1930s were challenged by Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Richard Attenborough is probably the last living director honourably bearing aloft a banner embroidered with Longfellow's words: "Lives of great men all remind us/ We can make our lives sublime". Film-makers now like to present us with portraits of deeply flawed heroes, whether they be rock stars, politicians or military leaders, to discover not just the secret of what motivated them but to reveal the worm in the rosebud. We no longer expect lives to be coherent, and we believe the real man is closer to the picture in the attic than to Dorian Gray.

The production team behind this energetic portrait of Ian Dury (Andy Serkis), the British new wave rock musician, lyricist, actor and punk music hall star who, if he didn't coin the phrase "sex & drugs & rock & roll", put it into the language through his 1977 hit song, clearly admire their subject. But they're determined not to celebrate him in any conventional manner, partly because such a thing would be unfashionable and partly, one assumes, because they feel this would be a betrayal of his anarchic character and art.

They've also set out to capture impressionistically Dury's chaotic way of life and his eclectic array of influences. Their chosen style employs fast cutting, animation, varieties of colour, fantasy, harsh reality, extreme stylisation, clips from newsreels and, a major coup, credit titles designed by the pop artist Peter Blake, who was one of Dury's teachers at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s.

Paul Viragh's script begins with a scene of Dury rehearsing in his suburban house, singing the cheeky Max Miller-like "Billericay Dickie" with his first band, Kilburn & the High Roads, blithely indifferent to the fact that his wife, Betty (Olivia Williams), is in labour upstairs. "I've just given birth," she says resignedly. "Any chance of keeping the noise down?" From the start, he is aggressive, angry, cruel, egotistical, as well as witty, charming and lovable; he doesn't mellow or change significantly over the 20-odd years from the late 60s to the early 80s that the movie covers. Crucial episodes in his earlier life, most notably the crippling polio he contracted while swimming at Southend at the age of nine in the late 40s, are seen in significant flashbacks. The movie ends some time before his death from cancer in March 2000 and does not touch on his interesting late career as an actor or his second marriage.

We are left in no doubt that the polio, which left Dury partly paralysed, wearing calipers on his left leg and walking with a stick, is what shaped him. Setting him apart as a child through the unhappy sojourn at a special school and as a boarder at a grammar school, the experience made him determined to spurn pity and sympathy. It also turned him into an acid social observer and caused him to identify with the working class. The movie skirts around his curious background, ignoring his middle-class, bohemian mother and her medical family and concentrating on his father (Ray Winstone), a former boxer who became a chauffeur for rich employers.

Practising what we now extol as "tough love", his dad raised him to stand up and fight back. Their relationship is paralleled in that between Ian and his son, Baxter (the excellent Bill Milner from Son of Rambow). Now a successful musician, he was somewhat unconventionally raised in the company of Dury and his warm-hearted black lover Denise (Naomie Harris). The boy first encounters her as she's having oral sex with his father. He's subsequently provided with ecstasy by a bizarre figure known as "the Sulphate Strangler" whom Dury has appointed to be his carer.

There are some remarkable sequences in this intentionally hectic whirlwind of a movie that in various ways recalls Fellini's 8½ and Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People (the director Mat Whitecross collaborated with Winterbottom in The Road to Guantanamo). One such sequence is the last performance by Dury's first band at a squalid London pub where he meets Denise and the young composer-musician Chaz Jankel, who was to be his crucial professional partner for over two decades in his major band, the Blockheads.

Another is a visit he makes to his old school for the disabled, when a tender, informal masterclass with the pupils ends with him shocking the head teacher by his reaction to the news that a bullying member of staff, who'd made his life hell, had committed suicide. "That's made my day, that has," he says. A third is the circumstances surrounding "Spasticus Autisticus", the provocative 1981 song inspired by the "I am Spartacus" scene in the Kubrick film as a riposte to the International Year of Disabled Persons.

The acting generally is first-class, but what holds the film together is the performance of Andy Serkis. His resemblance to Dury is simply uncanny, both in the appearance, the body language, the growling voice and the singing. More important, though, is the way he captures Dury's mercurial nature, the contradictions of his character, the uncontrollable impulses that drive him. He is a man ready to sacrifice anything in order to be the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.

By Philip French

Since making his debut in a 1951 Osamu Tezuka manga, the beloved Astro Boy has been retooled as a fondly remembered 1960s black-and-white animated series and, subsequently, full-color renditions in 1980 and again in 2003.

Finally going the big-screen, computer-generated route, the iconic Japanese hero manages to keep his innate lovability intact in a visually dynamic if overly eager-to-please family feature cobbled together with parts reclaimed from various animated classics.

Although the social-political allegorical elements could have benefited from a slyer, less obvious touch, an energetic voice cast headed by Freddie Highmore and Nicolas Cage ultimately saves the day.

Designed to cater to older kids and their nostalgic parents, the heavily marketed Summit Entertainment release could be well-positioned to attract a sizable demographic.

For the uninitiated, Astro Boy began life as Toby (Highmore), the wunderkind son of brilliant scientist Dr. Tenma (Cage), who is tragically killed in a robotic experiment gone terribly wrong.

Anguished, Tenma creates Astro Boy in Toby's image, but despite succeeding in programming him with all of his son's memories and characteristics, he ultimately rejects him as a convincing substitute.

Filled with rejection and chased by the military, Astro Boy flees from Metro City, the affluent metropolis perched in the sky, and crashes down to Earth, where vagabond kids scavenge for rusty, discarded robots and bring them back to their Fagin-like father figure, Hamegg (Nathan Lane).

There's obliviously a strong Pinocchio undercurrent running through the "Astro Boy" mythology, but in trying to make the movie version as accessible as possible, director David Bowers ("Flushed Away"), who shares screenplay credit with Timothy Hyde Harris ("Space Jam"), also has borrowed liberally from "WALL-E," "The Iron Giant" and "Robots," to name a few of its more notable influences.

A little more subtlety could also have been applied to a political subtext involving Blue Cores and Red Cores, power sources made with positive "blue" energy and negative, unstable "red" energy, with both being co-opted by the war-mongering President Stone (Donald Sutherland).

Then there's a whole other overt Marxist element that also might not go over so well in red states.

But that spirited voice cast, also including Bill Nighy, Eugene Levy and Kristen Bell, is among the year's best, and those gleaming, stylized backgrounds (taking their cue in part to the work of Katsushika Hokusai, a 19th century Japanese woodblock artist), effectively merge Eastern and Western sensibilites, even though the East in question was outsourced to Hong Kong.

By Michael Rechtshaffen

Filmmakers love a good prison. No, scrub that, filmmakers adore a bad prison. You can see why. For writers and directors, the volatile jail is a ready-made theatre, its prisoners and guards with their various conflicts and loyalties all perfect players for a drama that, if it tries hard enough, can reflect life on the outside too.

For French director Jacques Audiard (‘A Self-Made Hero’, ‘The Beat That My Heart Skipped’), a master of the old-school French thriller – ie thrilling and meaningful – his fifth film offers the chance to pull off both a state-of-nation primal scream and a terrific crime flick. He gives us Malik (Tahar Rahim), a French-Arab convict who enters a concrete-and-steel hell to serve a sentence of six years (so we know he can’t have done anything too dreadful). He tries to keep his head down, but this isn’t that sort of place. The ruling bully boys are the Corsican inmates, led by ageing but vicious César (Niels Arestrup), who forces Malik to kill another inmate in a very successful scene that’s one of the most claustrophobic and disturbing episodes I’ve seen in a long while. From here, Malik is César’s vassal, committed to working for him on the inside and, later, using a series of day-release excursions to represent his criminal interests on the outside.

But Malik is a clever individualist – a survivalist even – and at the same time that he learns to read and write, he exploits a friendship with another French-Arab prisoner, now released, to pursue his own drug deals and quietly invest in a power base within the jail. This is a world where partnerships are formed only for a reason, loyalties are fluid, friends barely exist at all. Politically, it’s a cynical film. Hope is absent.

Whether, though, it says anything meaningful about France, I’m not so sure. Malik is an extreme character, so his experience doesn’t reflect the French-Arab dilemma as a whole, even if the point is made about the number of immigrants in French jails and how being sent to prison for a minor offence can snowball into something else entirely. Audiard suggests that being an underdog – socially, racially, economically – in an unfriendly society can lead to desocialisation and anti-social behaviour. But Malik’s story is so wild that it obscures such ideas.

That said, it’s testament to Audiard’s skill at plunging us headfirst into a vicious parallel world that we mostly believe the film’s twisted logic and rituals. Also, his presentation of violence as a profit-and-loss account is effective and mature: while Malik’s initial murder may get him far, we witness nightly visions of his victim coming back to his cell to haunt him. But there are several bite-your-tongue moments. The film is realist in style and mood, but for every five spot-on observations, there is one flight of wild fancy. I’ve seen the film twice and still find baffling an episode in which Malik predicts that a deer will hit a car, thereby suggesting he is a prophet.

But the sheer force of Audiard’s direction can support such enigmas. It forces you, bullies you, persuades you to love his filmmaking style – even if not always to understand his motives.

by Dave Calhoun

The simple yet powerful story of the Prodigal Son was given a vigorous new interpretation in the 2004 Danish film "Brothers," directed by Susanne Bier from a screenplay she wrote with Anders Thomas Jensen. Irish director Jim Sheridan, who has made his films in America in recent years, now delivers an American remake that hues closely to the original but loses some of its true grit. The emotional devastation of the final reels still hits you hard, but you wonder how things would have played had Sheridan and writer David Benioff ("The Kite Runner") ventured into new territory.

"Brothers" boasts an impressive cast including Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal as the diametrically opposed siblings, with Natalie Portman as the woman caught between their forceful personalities. The movie looks to draw serious and older audiences, though the casting should attract more than a few young filmgoers. It certainly is heartening to see Lionsgate, with this film and the critically lauded "Precious," balance genre fare with artistically adventurous releases.

Neither version of "Brothers" is afraid to posit characters at such extremes as its two brothers. Sam Cahill (Maguire) is a straight-arrow Marine captain from a military family. He got good grades, played football, married his high school sweetheart, Grace (Portman), and is ready to deploy to Afghanistan on a fourth tour of duty. Younger brother Tommy (Gyllenhaal), just out of the slammer for bank robbery, is a drunk and a fool.

What is potentially very interesting in this version is the hint that their father, Hank, a Vietnam vet, played a key role in the brothers' diverse trajectories -- that a turbulent family life provoked strong though radically different reactions. Since gravelly Sam Shepard is playing the father, expectations are further raised that this psychological backstory might get rigorously explored. It is not.

Sam's helicopter is shot down, and he is presumed dead. (The Afghan war has been going on so long that it plays the same role in both movies, five years apart.) The tragedy jolts Tommy out of his alcoholic lethargy. He assumes a much greater role with his brother's family, remodeling a badly dysfunctional kitchen and becoming a kind of protector to his wife and pal to his two daughters. Inevitably, he falls for Grace.

In a parallel story, the film shows the appalling experiences of Sam and a fellow soldier (Patrick Flueger), who survived the crash but fell into the hands of the Taliban. Unfortunately, this is the weakest section of the film. Bier depicted the real horror in Sam's mental and physical challenges as well as his subtle relationship with his fellow soldier, so you believe the officer would snap and commit a soul-killing act in order to survive. This event is never convincing in the remake.

When Sam is liberated and returns home, he is a changed man who doubts his manhood and moral integrity. To then discover that Tommy has not only become responsible but, to Sam, is clearly in love with his wife sends him into convulsions of rage and jealousy, to the point that he is a danger to himself and his family.

These are the strongest moments of the film. Maguire is able to maintain an exterior not unlike his former self yet show you a shattered man inside. The forced smile he once used to referee between his dad and brother, who are always at odds with each other, now betrays the trauma he suffers.

Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, never seems as desolate as he probably should be. He has a little too much charm and merely seems to be going through a bad patch. Similarly, Shepard needs more scenes to investigate fully his troubled character.

Portman's Grace isn't in charge to the degree she might be as the new head of the household. This comes mostly from the writing, which makes her role largely reactive, but the actress glides through scenes too superficially, not leaving a distinct impression.

The two youngsters who plays the daughters, Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare, are exceptionally good in showing how adult misbehavior can damage and distort their natural trust and instincts.

Sheridan's behind-the-scenes team on this production, shot entirely in New Mexico, do fine work on what appears to be a modest budget.

By Kirk Honeycutt

When things go as seriously wrong as they do in the Sandra Bullock comedy All About Steve, a viewer is challenged to guess what the filmmakers thought they were doing. A 1930s screwball comedy with a modern sensibility? A misguided valentine to those who march to the beat of a different drummer?

Normally, Bullock's name above the title would guarantee a decent box-office tally. But here, reviews and word of mouth should be poisonous enough to counter that advantage.

What might have happened is that early in the shoot, the cast lost all confidence in Kim Barker's woeful script and began overselling every line. Certainly, neophyte feature director Phil Traill did nothing to correct all the bad acting.

Bullock has produced her own comedy vehicles before without miscalculating this badly. So what was she thinking when she decided to play Mary Magdalene Horowitz—yes, the woman is Jewish-Catholic—a writer of crossword puzzles whose motor-mouth drives everyone other than her forgiving parents to near suicide?

Mary spews out mysterious words and arcane facts with a nervous energy that suggests a mental disorder. She wears bright red go-go boots, and her clothes, accruements and bedroom posters—she lives with her parents—belong to a much less fashionable era.

Then there's her erratic behavior. One a first date, she literally jumps the guy. At another point, she actually thanks a truck driver for not raping her. Upon seeing a lethal twister in the desert, her response is to open an umbrella.

Consequently, when people encounter Mary, everyone starts edging away almost immediately. A bus driver tricks her into getting off the bus so it can continue on without her. Everyone aboard cheers. When she meets Mr. Right in the pleasing form of The Hangover's Bradley Cooper, he can't imagine she is anything other than a stalker. This is a character Bullock wanted to play?

Her fleeing guy, Steve (Cooper), is a cable-news cameraman. He accompanies Thomas Haden Church's pompous news reporter—in a performance that is all clichés—and field producer Ken Jeong (in the film's only restrained performance) to various hostage crises and natural disasters all over the western U.S. Mary, having been fired from her crossword-puzzle job in Sacramento, Calif., relentlessly pursues Steve to every breaking-news story.

Along the way, Mary and the news crew encounter characters who are eccentric but with nothing going on beneath the surface. Situations strain for laughs, with a stunt horse getting perhaps the biggest one. Not big, mind you, just the biggest in a movie filled with unfunny humans.

The film should be on airlines in two months and off everyone's resume within three. No animals including the horse were injured making the film, so Steve counts as no great crime. But it does leave one question: Why did anybody think an attractive female star should wear red boots in every scene of a movie?

By Kirk Honeycutt

Cynicism and sentiment have melded magically in movies by some of the best American directors, from Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder to Alexander Payne. Jason Reitman mined the same territory in "Thank You for Smoking" and his smash hit, "Juno," and it's pleasing to report that he's taken another rewarding journey down this prickly path in his eagerly awaited new film, "Up in the Air." Boasting one of George Clooney's strongest performances, the film seems like a surefire awards contender, and the buzz will attract a sizable audience, even though some viewers might be startled by the uncompromising finale.

Reitman and co-writer Sheldon Turner embellishes Walter Kirn's acclaimed novel about a man who spends much of his life in the air, traveling around the country to fire people for executives too gutless to do the dirty job themselves. The character is just about as unsavory as the corporate pimp played by Jack Lemmon in Wilder's "The Apartment." When a character begins as such a sleazeball, you know there must be a moral transformation lurking somewhere in the last reel. That redemption never quite arrives for Clooney's Ryan Bingham, which is one of the things that makes "Air" so bracing.

Before the movie plunges into deeper waters, it seduces us with some of the most darkly hilarious moments to grace the screen in years. Clooney's crack comic timing makes the most of Ryan's acrid zingers as he savors a life without the vaguest threat of commitment. Trouble arises when his boss hires a young dynamo, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who has the idea of cutting costs by instituting a program of firing people over the Internet instead of in person.

Ryan sees his footloose lifestyle threatened, but he is forced to take Natalie on a cross-country odyssey to train her in the niceties of delivering bad news deftly. The interplay between the world-weary Ryan and the naive Natalie makes for delicious comedy, and Kendrick plays her role smoothly. There's also a wonderful performance by Vera Farmiga as Alex, a dynamo who clicks with Ryan because she's also seeking no-strings sex on the run. ("Think of me as you with a vagina," Alex tells Ryan helpfully.)

Eventually, Ryan begins to question the assumptions that have ruled his life. His encounters with Alex and Natalie threaten his complacency. We can't help worrying that the film may take a sentimental turn, but miraculously, it never does. A scene in which Ryan returns home for a family wedding and talks a reluctant groom (well played by Danny McBride) into going through with the nuptials is a beautifully modulated sequence that manages to be poignant without ever falling into slop. Reitman is a rare director with heart as well as sardonic humor, but he always knows when to pull back. There is only one false note -- a montage sequence near the end in which several of the people fired by Ryan burble about their love for their families -- that simply restates the obvious.

But if this tiny gaffe reveals a touch of insecurity on Reitman's part, the rest of the film is perfectly controlled. The entire cast is splendid. A couple of "Juno" alumni pop up: Jason Bateman is the smarmy boss who makes Ryan look humane, and J.K. Simmons has a single scene that proves just how much a master actor can convey in two or three minutes of screen time.

The razor-sharp editing by Dana Glauberman gives the film a breezy momentum even while it's delivering piercing social insights. Holding everything together is Clooney, who bravely exposes the character's ruthlessness while also allowing us to believe in his too-late awakening to the possibilities he's missed. It's rare for a movie to be at once so biting and so moving. If Ryan's future seems bleak, there's something exhilarating about a movie made with such clear-eyed intelligence.

By Stephen Farber

As post-apocalyptic movie fiction goes, "The Book of Eli" is not a crowd-pleaser like the "Mad Max" series nor silly like any of the "Planet of the Apes" films. This film, the first from the Hughes Brothers in nearly nine years, instead is an intense, surprisingly serious study of a man making his way through a wilderness of catastrophic destruction and human cruelty like a latter-day prophet. An overlay of spiritual themes doesn't always work, but "Eli" is that rare Hollywood film that posits a Christian man as its hero.

The story is couched in neo-Western terms -- a solitary gunman comes to a town and confronts the corrupt sheriff and his maniacal deputies -- so the movie fits comfortably within the confines of mainstream studio moviemaking. And Denzel Washington is one of the few Hollywood stars who can pull off a larger-than-life character who can dispatch a gang of cutthroats with a nasty blade yet maintain an air of saintliness.

Boxoffice should be above average for this Warner Bros. release. Don't be surprised if the film is embraced by Christian filmgoers as the Holy Bible is seen as the point from which a new civilization can take shape.

Allen and Albert Hughes situate their story in an environment informed by graphic-novel imagery. Landscapes are stark, and characters strike poses. Working with cinematographer Don Burgess, they frequently drain the color from desolate stretches of desert (with New Mexico doing the honors). Roads are lined with ruined remnants of a prior civilization, the one before a "Flash" -- which occurred during the last war -- tore a hole in the sky and brought fatal, scorching light onto the Earth.

As in "Mad Max," anarchy rules, with mayhem, murder and rape seen as routine events. Washington's Eli claims to have walked west for 30 years, but everything looks like the bomb dropped only last month. No one has even bothered to bury bodies or develop any infrastructure.

After a "credential scene," in which Eli demonstrates his lethal abilities when challenged, he wanders into a desert town where a tin-pot dictator named Carnegie (Gary Oldman with his patented theatrical sleaze) holds sway. There is no discernible reason why he should rule a gang unless it's because he's the exception to the rule of near-universal illiteracy. (Carnegie is perusing a biography of Mussolini, please note.)

When Carnegie learns that Eli possesses a Bible, he means to win him over to his cause or kill him -- whatever it takes to gain control of that book. Both men see the Bible as the key to social regeneration. A voice has commanded Eli to take the Bible west, where it will be the foundation of a new Earth. Carnegie sees the book as a means of controlling people and their loyalties, as many false prophets have before him.

Caught in the showdown between two determined men are Carnegie's adopted daughter, Solara (Mila Kunis), and mistress Claudia (Jennifer Beals) as well as his henchman, Redridge (Ray Stevenson), who fancies Solara for himself. Things play out in a straight-forward fashion as screenwriter Gary Whitta gives little depth or complications to his characters or story. The Hughes Brothers' measured, well-paced direction complements the comic-book simplicity of this narrative.

A viewer will probably be grabbed less by the showdowns than by the mannered cinematography, Gae Buckley's eye-catching production design of a ruined Southwest and an energetic, pulsating score from Atticus Ross (assisted by Claudia Sarne and Leopold Ross). What is it about Earth's ruin that so inspires artists?

By Kirk Honeycutt

"It's Complicated" is a middle-aged sex comedy but with more rom-com urges than farcical ones. It's from writer-director Nancy Meyers, who has found a comfort zone in gentle, even warm comedies about older adults facing complications that re-direct their lives into pleasantly unexpected emotional channels.

"Complicated" forges ahead with these themes. Because no one else in Hollywood seemingly makes movies for middle-aged moviegoers, especially women, she inevitably scores boxoffice successes, and this one should forge ahead in that area, too.

What Meyers doesn't do is take chances. She sticks to formula and predictability. In "Complicated," this is as much a matter of casting as writing.

Meryl Streep, apparently not wasting any cooking lessons she had for "Julie & Julia," plays a divorced owner/pastry chef of a successful Santa Barbara bakery/restaurant. She is only now coming to terms with her divorce from Alec Baldwin, who dumped her 10 years earlier for a much younger woman. Even so, shopping for plastic surgery and building an extension to her rustic house indicates a certain restlessness despite her apparent equanimity.

An anniversary party on the West Coast and the graduation of one of their three grown children on the East Coast throws her together with her ex at a time when his wife (Lake Bell) isn't around. Wine flows, sparks fly and -- you would never guess but then again you probably will -- the two launch an unplanned, drunken affair. Suddenly, Streep is the "other" woman.

But the casting foreshadows most of the dramatic turns. Baldwin has developed a second career in films and television by more or less spoofing his macho image. So his character, a comic exaggeration of male befuddlement with womankind, is never a credible life choice for the restaurateur. Then, too, Steve Martin has just walked in: He's the architect who is going to change her life with that home extension, and you know even though he is more subdued than you might expect that he isn't in the story to discuss the importance of retaining walls.

In the movie comedy world dominated by Judd Apatow, Meyer's idea of naughtiness is charmingly quaint. The older adults -- hide this from the kids -- smoke pot! Yes, they do. Streep drops her bathrobe to expose her over-50-year-old body just as Diane Keaton did in Meyers' "Something's Gotta Give." (No, of course, you don't see anything.) The film's really racy moment comes when Baldwin's private parts are accidentally Skyped to an unwilling viewer.

The near-farcical maneuvers by the parents in and around their kids (Caitlin Fitzgerald, Zoe Kazan and Hunter Parrish) and one prospective son-in-law (John Krasinski) and the shocked/delighted reactions by her girl pals (Rita Wilson, Mary Kay Place, Alexandra Wentworth, Nora Dunn) to the affair get milked for all possible laughs they will yield.

What Meyers has going for her in all the films she has directed from her scripts is her ability to evoke a fantasy world where grown men can cry and realize their mistakes while grown women love them for that. Cynicism -- real cynicism, not the catty, superficial kind espoused by this First Wives Club chorus -- is banished and true love still is a possibility.

To whatever degree the writer-director is rewriting her own life story, crucially she is doing so for countless middle-aged women, and probably more than a few guys who need to swallow all the pills Baldwin's character does to get through the day.

This is a comfort zone for such viewers even if the characters are no more real than the models in Vanity Fair ads. Streep is a vision of mature loveliness, a smart, sexy mom who always knows the right things to say to the kids and how to extricate herself from embarrassing situations. Unlike the real world, she lives in a multiple-million-dollar home, can -- after a suitable number of comic mishaps -- make sense of her life and even get Skype to work without having to consult younger family members.

By Kirk Honeycutt

In "The Road," director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale, even at the cost of sacrificing color, big scenes and standard Hollywood imagery of post-apocalyptic America.

Shot through with a bleak intensity and pessimism that offers little hope for a better tomorrow, the film is more suitable to critical appreciation than to attracting huge audiences though topliners Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron will attract initial business.

The screenplay by Joe Penhall takes a very different tack from end-of-the-worlders like "Children of Men," choosing rigorous, low-key realism over special effects. The story is told largely through flashbacks, which are the memories of a father (Mortensen) struggling for survival on the road with his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

Ten years have passed since a series of terrible earthquakes and fires have destroyed the world. These spectacular catastrophes are barely glimpsed onscreen, however. The film unfolds as an anguishing forced march in which the father tries to protect the boy and lead them south, to a warmer climate where life may still be possible.

No animals and few men are left in this dying, gray world where no vegetation grows and food stocks have been used up long ago. Bundled in filthy coats, father and son trudge south with a shopping cart containing their few belongings. Hiding from bands of roving cannibals and forever on the brink of suicide, the only human thing that sustains them is the love they share.

Hillcoat and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe create a frighteningly barren world virtually devoid of color, where everything is covered with fine gray ash and even the sea has become gray. Occasional flashbacks to pre-disaster life offer momentary visual respites of color, music and warmth.

Theron, who is pregnant when the cataclysm occurs, appears here as an enigmatic figure both weak and strong, a realist who would prefer that the family save themselves from starvation by committing suicide, as many others have done. But there are only two bullets left in the gun. Her solitary leave-taking, waking out into the night, is a wrenching image.

In this kind of world, horror elements are there for the taking, but are kept in the background apart from one nightmarish scene in which father and son discover a lonely house in the woods. In the locked cellar are a dozen writhing, naked men and women with missing limbs -- stock for a band of well-fed cannibals. The duo also makes a narrow escape from a roving gang of rifle-toting desperadoes aboard a huge truck, who appear out of nowhere Mad Max style.

Most of the film, however, describes the bond between the still-innocent boy and his weathered, dying father. The boy, several times imagined by his father to be an angel or a god, struggles to find values the adult is unable to give him.

"We're the good guys, they're the bad guys" is the maximum moral guidance Mortensen has to offer. They do shelter in a ruined church and meet a wizened old-timer named Ely (Robert Duvall) who issues prophetic warnings, but the absence of God, and therefore hope, is a given throughout the film.

By Deborah Young