Dir. Ben Affleck
(2012, R, 120 minutes)
Argo is the third film by Ben Affleck as a director, and it’s probably his best; Gone Baby Gone was an impressive debut, and The Town was a somewhat disappointing followup. This new film doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s a taut, confidently made, straight-ahead thriller. It’s based on a true story, and generating suspense from documented events can be especially tricky – he’s building to an ending already in the history books – but Affleck succeeds.
Dir. Ben Affleck
(2010, R, 123 min)
★ ★
The Town is a watchable and competently made heist film without much to recommend it for. It’s the second film directed by actor Ben Affleck, whose first film was 2007’s darker and grittier Gone Baby Gone. This film, also set in a noir-ish Boston crime world, is constructed mostly of car chases, shootouts, and cliches — occasionally effective, but on the whole not very satisfying. I kept hoping it would develop into something of greater ambition or higher artistic stakes.
Dir. Kevin Macdonald
(2009, PG-13, 128 min)
★ ★ ½
I have an affection for State of Play that makes me want to bump it up that extra half star, but nagging reservations that won’t let me. It starts as an intelligent, unpretentious, straight-ahead thriller about the kind of hard-boiled investigative journalist who Gets Too Close To The Story, and its gradually unraveling conspiracy is exciting, but over time it starts to give in to laziness, and its plot undergoes one back flip too many before I’ve just lost interest.
Dir. Ken Kwapis
(2009, PG-13, 129 min)
★ ★
The trailers and TV ads teased a romantic comedy for the information age. They repeated, as a mission statement of sorts, a clever line of dialogue about the culture of BlackBerries, email accounts, social networking sites, and cell phones: “Now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”
Filmic 