Atonement Opens Dec. 7

Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement is a tony, literary meditation on the destructiveness of the imagination. The book applies modern techniques to classic Victorian prose to transform it from a standard romance into meta-fiction. Like other works of its genre — The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Unbearable Lightness of Being — it would seem beyond adaptation.

Yet Joe Wright, whose debut was the gorgeous Pride & Prejudice with Keira Knightly, gets inside the thorny material with a steady eye. Christopher Hampton’s compact screenplay helps.

In 1935, at the estate of the Tallis family, the household is aflutter with activity for the homecoming of eldest brother Leon. Youngest daughter Briony (Saoirse Ronan) has written a play for the occasion. Older sister Cecilia (Knightley), petulant and bored, has a strange encounter with Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the son of the family housekeeper, that is overseen and misunderstood by Briony, which sets into motion a series of misapprehensions that will inexorably change their lives.

The segments at the estate are thrilling. Wright employs time shifts and alternative perspectives to illuminate the elastic nature of truth. The pacing, thanks to editor Paul Tothill, is stunning. And the film is expertly cast, though first among equals is young Ronan, who renders Briony with matching parts, righteous indignation and adolescent confusion.

It’s a good thing the opening is as strong as it is; the film drags in the middle. Though skillfully lighted, it’s never clear what’s going on during the World War II scenes, though McAvoy and Knightley give —perhaps—their sharpest screen performances. Still, a compelling story has been put into motion. We stick with it to see where a fierce imagination—McEwan’s yes, but also Wright’s—will finally take us. And though it’s not a flawless film, Atonement does come to a satisfying end. B+ —Dan Loughry

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Opens Nov. 30

The first 20 minutes of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are shot in the constant point of view of Jean-Dominique Bauby. Big deal, you say? Well, it is: Jean-Do—as his friends call him—has suffered a paralyzing stroke.

Based on the beloved French book, Julian Schnabel’s film begins in media res as Bauby awakes from a coma. The prognosis is grim. He learns, as we do, that he’s lost the ability to move, to speak. Yet he can think, and Schnabel uses Bauby’s running internal monologue to play these experiential scenes for a comic effect that softens us to the harsh story of a life interrupted.

Mathieu Amalric—best known here for a minor role in Munich—is a marvel as Bauby. We don’t glimpse him at first. Rather, we hear his irreverent thoughts as they pass judgment on the tightly smiling faces of doctors, therapists, friends, family. Once his dire situation is established, only then does Schnabel reveal the man: an immobile patient with one large, questioning eye. That fluttering eye is all that links Bauby to the world. He uses it to relearn how to communicate. (It’s also how he painstakingly wrote, with the help of a translator, his book.) When we’re finally shown a pre-stroke Bauby, it’s a testament to the command of Amalric’s performance that we never disbelieve the actor in either guise.

Schnabel—a painter and sculptor—has become a front-rank director with only three films to his name, each marked by a diverse visual style; from the downtown art world grunge of Basquiat to the primal allure of Cuba in Before Night Falls. This latest project lets his boundless inventiveness evoke both a surrealistic inner life and the aching wane of the physical world. If Bauby cries, it’s the camera that fogs up. When he blinks the tear away, the purified lens allows him—and us—to see the world anew. A —D.L.

Grace Is Gone Opens Dec. 7

It hasn’t been a good year for movies about or inspired by the Iraq war. Just look at the disappointing box office returns for No End in Sight, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition and Lions for Lambs—films that, for all their star power (Witherspoon, Gyllenhaal, Streep, Cruise, etc.), have not been able to lure Middle America out to the cineplex. And it doesn’t look like that trend is going to come to an end with Grace Is Gone, James C. Strouse’s gentle, but frustrating character study about grief and loss in the face of war.

A miscast John Cusack—in serious actor mode as a rug store manager whose wife is killed while serving in the Iraq war—dons a schlubby, second-rate department store wardrobe and eye glasses, and walks with a slight limp to convey his character’s everyday Joe Schmoe-ness. Shocked and grief-stricken by his spouse’s death, he takes his two young daughters on a spontaneous road trip to visit an amusement park in Florida, biding his time until the he finds the right moment to tell them that their mother won’t ever be coming home. Along the way, his youngest daughter talks back, his oldest daughter sneaks out of the hotel room to smoke cigarettes with a teenage boy, and the father finds himself at a loss for how to go on with life.

It may sound like a recipe for a movie that is teeming with emotional breakthroughs, but Strouse opts for no such catharsis. Instead, he paints a sad—but not quite heartbreaking—portrait of grief that is so matter-of-fact in its matter-of-factness that it renders itself indifferent to its own sadness. And, while some may appreciate Strouse’s refusal to make a “message film,” the lack of an opinion about current affairs also holds the film back. It’s one thing to not want to hit audiences over the head with polemics; it’s another thing entirely not to have a point of view at all. B- —Ken Knox