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A SINGLE MAN Famous fashion designer Tom Ford clearly tries too hard with his directorial debut, but I prefer his overreaching to the cookie-cutter approach displayed by cinematic neophytes merely aping their contemporaries. If nothing else, this adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's novel has a visual style that's clearly its own, and while some of the mise-en-scenes smack of pretension, most are quite beautiful and serve the overall mood of the piece. Set in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, the film casts Colin Firth as British professor George Falconer, a closeted homosexual still reeling from the death of his longtime lover (Matthew Goode, seen frequently in flashback). Falconer stumbles through a seemingly typical day fully intent on killing himself that evening, but before that's set to happen, he spends some meaningful one-on-one time with various people, including his lonely friend Charley (Julianne Moore) and Kenny (About a Boy's Nicholas Hoult, all grown up), a sexually ambiguous student who wants to hear more of his teacher's philosophies. The ending, which would be considered a deus ex machina moment had it not been briefly (and clumsily) telegraphed toward the beginning of the film, is a major letdown, but everything leading up to it is pleasingly mature and understated. ***
THE WHITE RIBBON Writer-director Michael Haneke, whose penchant for ambiguity worked far more successfully in 2005's mesmerizing Cache, here spins a tale about a small German village in the period right before World War I. Aside from the schoolteacher-narrator (Christian Friedel) and his sweetheart (Leonie Benesch), just about everyone else seems to be up to no good. When he's not insulting the midwife who's provided him with years of oral sex, the town doctor is merrily fingering his own teenage daughter. The local minister ties his son down at bedtime so the boy can't pleasure himself (as the holy man explains, that only leads to sickness and death), but is taken aback when he sees that his frustrated daughter has killed his canary by ramming a pair of scissors through its tiny head. And just who is responsible for the string of accidents that's plaguing this already paranoid community? Haneke's implicit suggestion that the actions of this village reflect the ideologies that would propel the country through two world wars has apparently struck many as brilliant but seems merely facile to me. Likewise, the decision to shuffle so many similar-looking characters on and off the screen (it took me half the movie to figure out which children belonged in which households) in an effort to dehumanize them proves to be equally disingenuous. Christian Berger's black-and-white camerawork is striking to behold, but Haneke's brutal moralizing is likely to leave viewers black-and-blue. **
THE WOLFMAN Loosely based on the 1941 classic The Wolf Man, this disappointing new take casts Benicio Del Toro in Lon Chaney Jr.'s iconic role of Lawrence Talbot, the British-born nobleman who returns to his family estate after spending most of his life in the United States. Estranged from his aloof father, Sir John Talbot (Anthony Hopkins), Lawrence prefers the company of his late brother's fiancee, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), but he fears for her safety after a wound from a ferocious creature periodically turns him into a monster. Although he's physically right for the role, Del Toro's line readings are unbearably stilted, and he brings none of the playfulness that Chaney contributed in his rendition. In short, he's a brooding bore. Fresh from triumphing as the title character in The Young Victoria, Blunt is alarmingly one-note, hampered by a sketchy part that allows her to do little more than pout and fret. As for Hopkins, he's clearly indifferent to the whole project, and one suspects his eyes kept darting back and forth between the dopey script in one hand and the hefty paycheck in the other as he mulled over whether to accept the part. The makeup design by Rick Baker is excellent, although the transformation scenes aren't nearly as thrilling as the pivotal one in 1981's An American Werewolf in London (for which Baker won the first of his six Oscars). Yet what sinks the film on the technical side is the abundance of CGI effects; these simply come off as (no pun intended) overkill, with Johnston pouring on the gore in an effort to disguise the fact that the picture contains nothing in the way of genuine suspense or scares. Johnston's heavy use of cheap "gotcha!" moments (i.e. when the setting is quiet and then something suddenly LEAPS! into the frame or DASHES! across the screen) likewise points to his inability to coax any authentic reactions out of audience members, who will probably be too busy tittering at the risible dialogue anyway to concentrate on much else. As for the epic battle pitting werewolf versus werewolf -- well, let's just say it couldn't be any less frightening had the filmmakers elected to pit Pekingese against Poodle. *1/2
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