“The Road”
** 1/2 (out of 4)
A father and his young son make their way toward the coast after an unspecified disaster has wrecked the planet. Viggo Mortensen plays “The Man.” His son, “the Boy,” is portrayed by Australian Kodi Smit-McPhee. Austrailan director John Hillcoat could find few more dedicated partners in this harrowing undertaking than Mortensen. He’s a truth seeker. In mining for the authentic, he makes the Man a complex but hardly admirable figure. Charlize Theron appears as the Man’s wife and the Boy’s mother. While Hillcoat deftly reaps the grim, he never heeds the seedling of hope in this big-screen adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning fable about parental love in an abject world. R. 1 hour, 53 minutes. Lisa Kennedy
“Dear John”
** (out of 4)
Lasse Hallstrom’s movie tells the heartbreaking story of two young people who fail to find happiness together because they’re trapped in an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. Their romance leads to bittersweet loss. Channing Tatum stars as John Tyree, a handsome Army Special Forces specialist home on two weeks’ leave at the South Carolina shore. Amanda Seyfried plays Savannah, an ethereal beauty whose purse falls off a pier. John dives in and retrieves it. In the few precious days they share, they fall deeply into PG-13 love. PG-13. 1 hour, 48 minutes. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
More Releases
Available today
All My Friends Are Funeral Singers
Bigger and Blackerer: David Cross
Butterfly Dreaming
By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume 2
Call Me Madame
Hard Ride to Hell
Hoarders
I Know What I Saw
Stagecoach
The Unidentified
The Virginian: The Complete First Season
Visions and Miracles
Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs on the Road (2007)
The World of Buckminster Fuller
