REVIEW BY DAVID ANSEN, NEWSWEEK
"Anyone who fell in love with the landmark 11-part British TV series of 'Brideshead Revisited' 26 years ago is likely to approach the movie version debuting next week with extreme trepidation. Not to mention all those who have fallen under the spell of Evelyn Waugh's opulent, elegiac 1945 novel. How could this rich work possibly be condensed into a film running a bit over two hours? "Director Julian Jarrold ('Becoming Jane') and screenwriters Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock clearly knew they'd be facing comparisons—Jarrold, not wanting to be influenced by the Granada TV series, claims not to have seen the original. They argue that this literary classic, like a Shakespeare play, needs to be reinterpreted for a new generation, re-evaluated with contemporary eyes. In fact, more than any Waugh novel, 'Brideshead' lends itself to different readings: what you take away from it says as much about your own obsessions and world view as it does about Waugh's intentions. Written during the privations of World War II, the book looks back to the '20s and '30s, memorializing the last gasp of the dying aristocratic order. Waugh's stand-in is the covetous, wide-eyed, middle-class painter Charles Ryder, who fall in love with the children of the Marchmain family, Roman Catholic aristocrats who invite him into their imposing ancestral home, Brideshead Castle.According to Waugh, who converted to Catholicism in 1930, his theme was 'the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.' Yet the primal 'Brideshead' image to me is the one that adorned the paperback I read in college: the charming, decadent Sebastian Flyte carrying a teddy bear. For some it may be the grand estate itself and its real-life stand-in: Castle Howard, a setting so iconic in the series that the filmmakers used it again. For many who worshiped weekly at the 'Brideshead' altar in 1982, the series was the apotheosis of a certain mandarin gay sensibility, even though the homosexual motifs were

always unstated, and the nature of Charles's infatuation with Sebastian left ambiguous. I'd bet that many barely remember the issues of sin and sacrifice and Catholic guilt that lurk in the mystical depths of 'Brideshead's' last act. For the non-Catholic reader, and for contemporary viewers, Waugh's spiritual themes don't quite take hold; it's as if he created characters too strong to fit the mold of their author's intentions. His artistry outshone his ideology. "The remarkable thing about Jarrold's movie is how much of the book it manages to capture. The focus has shifted: it's structured as a love triangle. Ryder (Matthew Goode, in the role that made Jeremy Irons a star) falls first for the dandy Sebastian (Ben Wishaw), who widens his worldly horizons, and then for his sophisticated, spiritually conflicted sister Julia (Hayley Atwell). Sebastian's sexual attraction to Charles has been made more explicit; his jealousy when he discovers (in a scene that's not in the novel) that Ryder and Julia are in love is the trauma that sends him spiraling into his alcoholic decline. As Sebastian, the thin, dark-haired Whishaw is both the most riveting thing about the movie and the most problematic, for he has radically reinvented the character. Febrile, tightly wound and more overtly gay than the blond, debonair Anthony Andrews, Whishaw's vulnerable Sebastian seems doomed from the get-go. Jarrold's movie, rushing too fast through the halcyon days at Oxford, short-shrifts Sebastian's legendary charm. Other omissions are painful but understandable: the extravagant, stuttering queen Anthony Blanche has been reduced to a cameo; young Cordelia barely registers; Ryder's father, played by John Gielgud on TV, has lost his best scenes. What remains, however, is formidable. Emma Thompson makes the iron-willed Lady Marchmain a figure both terrifying and sympathetic; Michael Gambon's lusty Lord Marchmain, who's abandoned his family for life in Venice with his mistress (Greta Scacchi), gets the most out of his brief appearances, and Atwell is a wonderfully sensual and sharp-edged Julia, torn between her love for Charles and her religious beliefs. "The toughest role, because it's so reactive, is Ryder himself. Because the film doesn't rely as heavily on voice-over to convey his inner thoughts, Goode faces a challenge illuminating the soul of this diffident, divided, ambitious man, whose own social and sexual aspirations even he doesn't fully understand. It's a solid, sensitive performance. He sounds remarkably like Irons, but he doesn't have Irons's quicksilver transparency, that ability to let us see the roiling feelings under Charles's formal English reserve. "Think of Jarrold's briskly paced, stylish abridgment as a fine introduction to Waugh's marvelously melancholy elegy. It brings these unforgettable characters to life again, and if it sends people back to the novel, and back to Charles Sturridge's classic TV series, all the better. There's room for more than one 'Brideshead' in this far less glamorous day and age."

<>The writing and filmmaking style are often poetic, and the dialogue, steeped in '90s phrases, sounds believable. Though teen angst is familiar cinematic turf, the key to the film's authenticity lies in Peck's winning performance. THE WACKNESS is both darkly funny and life-affirming, in an offbeat and offhanded way. "

REVIEW BY DUANE BYRGE, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

"PARK CITY -- Sunday mornings don't usually go down with standing ovations, but THE WACKNESS inspired a packed Sundance house to forget their Saturday-night pains and stand up and cheer. A rollicking performance by Ben Kingsley as a pothead psychiatrist would steal the show in lesser films, but THE WACKNESS  is not overpowered: It rips in all aspects, compliments of talented writer-director Jonathan Levin. Generically, it's a rite-of-summer-passage yarn, but THE WACKNESS bursts the form.

 " In this 1994-set piece, recent high-school grad Luke (Josh Peck) sells weed and yearns to get laid. He trades grass for therapy from a drug-fuddled shrink (Kingsley) who exhorts him to sow his wild oats, albeit in more colorful language. Under filmmaker Levine's inspired hand, the performances erupt with precise energies. As the decadent doctor, Kingsley is marvelous as a randy old-goat, who anesthetizes his fears that life has passed him by. Peck as low-key Luke is a wonderful touchstone, exuding both decency and daring, while Thirlby is entrancing as the temptress teen, delicately revealing her wild-child's emotional wounds.
"Technical contributions torque this splendid movie ride. Special praise to editor Josh Noyes for the well-calibrated pace, and composer David Torn for the ripe and torrid sounds."

REVIEW BY ROGER EBERT, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Tarsem's "The Fall" is a mad folly, an extravagant visual orgy, a free-fall from reality into uncharted realms. Surely it is one of the wildest indulgences a director has ever granted himself. Tarsem, for two decades a leading director of music videos and TV commercials, spent millions of his own money to finance "The Fall," filmed it for four years in 28 countries and has made a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it.

"The Fall" is so audacious that when Variety calls it a "vanity project," you can only admire the man vain enough to make it. It tells a simple story with vast romantic images so stunning I had to check twice, three times, to be sure the film actually claims to have absolutely no computer-generated imagery. None? What about the Labyrinth of Despair, with no exit? The intersecting walls of zig-zagging staircases? The man who emerges from the burning tree? Perhaps the key words are "computer-generated." Perhaps some of the images are created by more traditional kinds of special effects.

The story framework for the imagery is straightforward. In Los Angeles, circa 1915, a silent movie stunt man has his legs paralyzed while performing a reckless stunt. He convalesces in a half-deserted hospital, its corridors of cream and lime stretching from ward to ward of mostly empty beds, their pillows and sheets awaiting the harvest of World War I. The stunt man is Roy (Lee Pace), pleasant in appearance, confiding in speech, happy to make a new friend of a little girl named Alexandria (Catinca Untaru).

Roy tells a story to Alexandria, involving adventurers who change appearance as quickly as a child's imagination can do its work. We see the process. He tells her of an "Indian" who has a wigwam and a squaw. She does not know these words, and envisions an Indian from a land of palaces, turbans and swamis. The verbal story is input from Roy; the visual story is output from Alexandria.

The story involves Roy (playing the Black Bandit) and his friends: a bomb-throwing Italian anarchist, an escaped African slave, an Indian (from India), and Charles Darwin and his pet monkey, Wallace. Their sworn enemy, Governor Odious, has stranded them on a desert island, but they come ashore (riding swimming elephants, of course) and wage war on him.

Roy draws out the story for a personal motive; after Alexandria brings him some communion wafers from the hospital chapel, he persuades her to steal some morphine tablets from the dispensary. Paralyzed and having lost his great love (she is the Princess in his story), he hopes to kill himself. There is a wonderful scene of the little girl trying to draw him back to life.

Either you are drawn into the world of this movie or you are not. It is preposterous, of course, but I vote with Werner Herzog, who says if we do not find new images, we will perish. Here a line of bowmen shoot hundreds of arrows into the air. So many of them fall into the back of the escaped slave that he falls backward and the weight of his body is supported by them, as on a bed of nails with dozens of foot-long arrows. There is scene of the monkey Wallace chasing a butterfly through impossible architecture.

At this point in reviews of movies like "The Fall" (not that there are any), I usually announce that I have accomplished my work. I have described what the movie does, how it looks while it is doing it, and what the director has achieved. Well, what has he achieved? "The Fall" is beautiful for its own sake. And there is the sweet charm of the young Romanian actress Catinca Untaru, who may have been dubbed for all I know, but speaks with the innocence of childhood, working her way through tangles of words. She regards with equal wonder the reality she lives in, and the fantasy she pretends to. It is her imagination that creates the images of Roy's story, and they have a purity and power beyond all calculation. Roy is her perfect storyteller, she is his perfect listener, and together they build a world.

Ebert notes: The movie's R rating should not dissuade bright teenagers from this celebration of the imagination.