Based on the well-regarded novel by Myla Goldberg, and nicely trimmed to fit the screen by the writer Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, "Bee Season" centers on the Naumanns. The paterfamilias is Saul, a professor of religion played with more physical charisma than plausibility by Richard Gere. Juliette Binoche plays Saul's wife, Miriam, a French Catholic who on her marriage converted to Judaism. The beating heart of the Naumann family is Eliza (the wonderful Flora Cross), a doleful beauty with bottomless eyes that flutter closed whenever she spells out a word.
The story, which takes flight shortly after Eliza wins her first spelling bee, traces her progression from school champion to state and national contender, a trajectory that unexpectedly upends her entire family. For each of the Naumanns, including the only son, the teenage Aaron (Max Minghella), Eliza's success becomes a mirror that reflects their own often unflattering fears, desires and self-interest. Like the kaleidoscope that Miriam gives to her daughter, the mirror shatters a world the Naumanns believed to be whole. How that world splinters and how all the family members subsequently arrange their individual pieces of the puzzle turn this domestic melodrama into something of a psychological thriller times four. • Go to Review | Movie Details | Showtimes | Trailers
Derailed Reviewed by MANOHLA DARGIS Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen star in this glossy and often risible bit of trash about an adulterous affair gone bad, bad, bad. • Go to Review | Movie Details | Showtimes | Trailers
Pride & Prejudice Reviewed by STEPHEN HOLDEN The sumptuous new screen adaptation of Jane Austen's 1813 novel gathers you up on its white horse and gallops off into the sunset. • Go to Review | Movie Details | Showtimes | Trailers
Zathura: A Space Adventure Reviewed by STEPHEN HOLDEN An extraterrestrial fantasy, based on a children's book by Chris Van Allsburg, that feels both real and unreal, like a dream you could shake off at any moment. • Go to Review | Movie Details | Showtimes | Trailers
"The Producers," "Rent" and "Narnia" leap to the big screen, five actors to watch, new DVD's, a multimedia preview with Manohla Dargis, a three-month release calendar and more. • Go to Holiday Movies
Speaking Softly While Tromping on Taboos By MARCELLE CLEMENTS Dirty. Filthy. Bawdy. Raunchy. Raw. Biting. Depraved. Many comedians would be thrilled to read these insults in their reviews. But Sarah Silverman protests.
New DVD's: Critic's Choice By DAVE KEHR The box set "Rebel Samurai: Sixties Swordplay Classics" includes four Japanese samurai films. Also, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1968 masterpiece, "Le Samourai."
Jarhead wbfilms said: "Sam Mendes has created a war film that strips away the actual combat of war and replaced it with the desperation and frustration that gung-ho soldiers experience with the anticipation of combat. What makes this film great, if not flawed, is that Mendes has chosen to present a new perspective on warfare in the 21st century without praising or condemning it."
jworthen2 said: "'Jarhead' is an apt metaphor for the title: an empty vessel. Thin, gutless and, I hate to say it, boring."
Readers' Favorites The following movies have received ratings of at least four stars from Times readers.
Pride and Prejudice (1940) "The most crisp and crackling satire in costume that we in this corner can remember ever having seen on the screen," wrote Bosley Crowther in The Times on Aug. 9, 1940. Go to Review Archive
Readers' Opinions
Join a Discussion on Movies How well will holiday blockbusters like "Rent," "King Kong" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" live up to expectations?
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