Capsules by Michael Sragow. Full reviews are at
baltimoresun.com/movies.
Boy A : *** ( 3 STARS)This film centers on a young man released from prison after a lengthy term for an atrocity committed when he was a child. Andrew Garfield pulls off a death-defying act of imagination in the role. With a new name and a made-up past, this profoundly troubled character manages to get a job and fall in love. His case worker (Peter Mullan) views him as his "greatest accomplishment." Our antihero is not so sure. The genius of Garfield's performance is that he fills him with equal amounts of terror and wonder. We measure his ups and downs with each beat of our hearts. R 100 minutes
Brick Lane : *** ( 3 STARS) This London-based tale of a young Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), who begins to feel trapped in her arranged marriage to a decades-older man, Chanu (Satish Kaushik), lacks the stature we associate with tragedy or tragicomedy. But the movie evokes tears and laughter in its evocation of Bangladeshi tradition and modernism colliding in the streets of London. In its portrait of a husband who painfully comes to know his limitations, the film achieves that rarest quality: nobility. PG-13 102 minutes
Elegy: *** ( 3 STARS) An aging critic and academic (Ben Kingsley) sees an intoxicatingly beautiful student (Penelope Cruz) as his last chance for ecstasy; Kingsley is miscast, but Cruz and the supporting players (Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard and Dennis Hopper) are superb. R 107 minutes
Frozen River : *** ( 3 STARS) This solid, satisfying, ruthlessly character-driven thriller focuses an unblinking eye on the fraying lives of Native Americans and struggling whites living in and around the Mohawk Reservation on the New York-Canada border. It creates a charged emotional atmosphere in which you feel anything can happen. As a working-class mother who smuggles illegal immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River, Melissa Leo brings a ferocious brusqueness to a downward-spiraling character and is never less than galvanic. R 97 minutes
Star Wars: The Clone Wars : ** 1/2 ( 2 1/2 STARS) Lucasfilm's feature-length cartoon gives fanboys and fangirls their chance to see sweeping big-screen images of the Jedi using their clone armies to protect the Republic against the Dark Lords of the Sith and their droid armies. It's not exactly thrilling, but young audiences will lap it up like ice cream, and its good humor and faith in the Force will put adults in a Saturday-morning frame of mind. PG 98 minutes
