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ROAD TO PERDITION The screen version of Road to Perdition may be paved with good intentions, but that may not be enough to appease fans of the acclaimed 1998 graphic novel penned by Max Allan Collins and illustrated by Richard Piers Rayner. And yet, I doubt most will mind the liberties taken by director Sam Mendes (in his sophomore effort following American Beauty) and scripter David Self (Thirteen Days) as they bring this stark story to the screen. Renowned for its involving storyline and eerily atmospheric black-and-white imagery, the Perdition novel tapped into near-mythic elements on its own pulp level, yet the movie not only manages to reproduce that sentiment but also to improve on it, adding additional levels of portent to its weighty tale of family dysfunction in the gangster era. In one of his finest, most subtle performances, Tom Hanks stars as a soft-spoken mob hit man who, along with his 12-year-old son (Tyler Hoechlin), hits the road seeking revenge after his wife and other son are murdered by the rash offspring (Daniel Craig) of his employer (Paul Newman). This is that rare film that improves on its source material, thanks partly to the three-dimensional tweaking of Newman's crime lord and the addition of a new foil for Hanks' hit man: a crime scene photographer (Jude Law) who doubles as an assassin-for-hire. Conrad L. Hall's cinematography is outstanding, yet even the visual panache takes a back seat to the absorbing father-son dynamics that resonate throughout the picture. 
1/2
SIGNS There's been much discussion about how the unofficial cinematic theme of the summer has been father-son relations (Road to Perdition, Minority Report, Austin Powers In Goldmember), but it seems to me that the unofficial theme of the entire year has been the ability of deceased wives to reach out from beyond the grave to offer guidance to their emotionally floundering spouses. Like The Mothman Prophecies and Dragonfly, the latest yarn from writer-director M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) is at heart a story about a man, in this case a former reverend (Mel Gibson), whose faith is tested after the loss of his wife but who slowly comes around once he opens his mind to the possibilities of supernatural intervention. Yet since that plotline won't have 'em lining up at the box office, Shyamalan wraps his metaphysical musings around a rickety story about how the crop markings in Gibson's corn fields might be early clues that an extra-terrestrial invasion might be imminent. As long as Shyamalan keeps his film swathed in shadows, it achieves its goal, with the director's understated style and Gibson's strong performance working nicely in tandem with the overall air of ambiguity. But once matters are spelled out in the second half (think Independence Day without a budget), the movies loses its potency, limping its way toward a highly contrived finale that's supposed to tie everything neatly together but instead merely comes off as Shyamalan's latest desperate attempt to one-up the twist ending of The Sixth Sense. 1/2
TADPOLE It's been 35 years since Mrs. Robinson seduced Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, and in the interim a name's been given to this extra-curricular activity. "Tadpoling" is the term given when a woman hooks up with a man at least 10 years younger, and zaught up in such a scenario. Twenty-four-year-old newcomer Aaron Stanford plays 15-year-old Oscar, a student advanced far beyond his years (he's apt to quote Voltaire at any given moment and has no patience for girls his age who, as he puts it, possess "baby hands"). Oscar has fallen in love with his stepmother Eve (Sigourney Weaver), but it's Eve's best friend Diane (an excellent Bebe Neuwirth) who ends up bedding him while both are buzzed; this puts Oscar in a dilemma, as he doesn't want his stepmother learning about his tryst lest it interfere with his pursuit of her. It's a refreshing change to have an intelligent male teenager for a protagonist (Oscar wouldn't be caught dead hanging out with the characters in Dude, Where's My Car? or other such inane features), and writer-director Gary Winick, who shot this film for under a million and then took it to Sundance (where it earned him the Best Director prize), and co-writers Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller approach this potentially controversial material in a bubbly manner that may irk moral crusaders but will delight others attuned to its witty frequency.
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