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PRIDE & PREJUDICE In adapting Jane Austen's literary staple, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Deborah Moggach have done an exemplary job of making us care all over again about the plight of the Bennet sisters, whose busybody mom (Brenda Blethyn) sets about finding them suitable husbands against the backdrop of 19th century England. The oldest daughter Jane (Rosamund Pike) immediately lands a suitor, but the independent Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) finds herself embroiled in a grudge match with the brooding Mr. Darcy (Matthew MacFadyen). Romanticists who fell hard for Colin Firth's Darcy in the 1995 BBC miniseries may or may not warm to MacFadyen (who's fine in the role), but there's no quibbling over Knightley's intuitive, note-perfect work as Elizabeth. Kudos, also, to Roman Osin's endlessly inventive camerawork, the sort not usually found in period pieces of this nature. ***
RENT For all its energy, this film version of the Broadway smash never quite busts free, a problem that may rest more with the modern film industry's inexperience with musicals than with anything director Chris Columbus brings to the party. There hasn't been a great movie musical since Milos Forman's Hair back in 1979, and outer space has long since replaced the songbook as the filmmakers' avenue of choice for fanciful flights of expression and imagination. Given the current climate in Hollywood, I'm inclined to give Columbus a break, since his movie is easy to like and even easier to hum. Updating Puccini's 1896 opera La Boheme, Rent's late creator Jonathan Larson focuses on a group of bohemians trying to get by while living in New York's East Village. If it all sounds like Melrose Place on welfare, the story's defining characteristic is that half of its leading players are HIV-positive, lending an air of poignancy to the proceedings as the players belt out catchy tunes. ***
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE Marital discord receives an innovative treatment in this feature that earned Noah Baumbach writing and directing awards at Sundance. In 1986 Brooklyn, a college professor (Jeff Daniels) and his wife (Laura Linney) reach the conclusion that their marriage is on its last fumes. Upon separating, they subject their sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) to all manner of ill-advised actions, which only serve to confuse the boys even further. The film is tantalizing in the way in which it presents just enough information so that we can't help but come to the conclusion that the self-absorbed Bernard and Joan are lousy parents -- yet then it pulls the rug out from under us by showing evidence to the contrary. Never denigrating itself by offering facile answers, it examines the difficulties of joint custody, the flaw in favoring one parent over the other, and the continued ability to wring mood out of Tangerine Dream's score for Risky Business. All four lead performances are outstanding. ***1/2
WALK THE LINE One often encounters an overwhelming sense of déjà vu when watching a biopic about a celebrity, since they tend to trace the expected ups and downs in the most conventional manner possible. Yet "conventional" doesn't have to mean "boring," and for all its familiarity, there's plenty to like about Walk the Line. Director James Mangold, adapting (with co-scripter Gill Dennis) two Johnny Cash autobiographies, does a fine job of capturing an electric period in rock history without any strains of self-importance. First and foremost, though, the film positions itself as a love story, one that finds Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) locating his soulmate in country star June Carter (Reese Witherspoon). Phoenix commands the screen, yet even he's topped by Witherspoon in her most fully realized performance since Election. Phoenix may provide the movie with its voice, but it's Witherspoon who delivers its soul. ***
YOURS, MINE AND OURS A descent into the pits of hell disguised as a motion picture, Yours, Mine and Ours is the sort of broad, insincere schmaltz that moviegoers seem to eat up at this time of year (see: Cheaper By the Dozen in 2003 and Christmas With the Kranks in 2004). A widower (Dennis Quaid) with eight kids bumps into his former high school sweetheart, now a widow (Rene Russo) with 10 children. On a whim, they decide to get married, but managing a household comprised of 18 minors proves to be a formidable challenge. A remake of a pleasant 1968 film with Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball, this jettisons all semblance of wit for the sake of one noisy, overwrought sequence after another. Somebody please kill this before it breeds again. *