Pan's Labyrinth

Ooh boy. This Spanish film is sooo not a kid's movie. The trailers mask the depth, drama and true horror of this tragic tale set during the Spanish Civil War. I honestly thought I was going to see a "happy flick". Instead, I watched a Spanish dictator torture and kill rebels in the woods, heads bashed in with a wine bottle, bodies slashed by stolen knives and a 12-year-old girl (Ofelia) desperately trying to keep it together. Her pregnant mom lies near her death while her stepdad (the fascist Capt. Vidal) cares only for his newborn son-to-be. Ofelia is a darker Alice in Wonderland who lives in the land of make-believe. Who wouldn't when your dad is a killer and your mom can't protect you? She's convinced (by a faun she meets down an Alice in Wonderland like hole) that she is the princess of the underworld with a duty to restore balance to her kingdom. Her three challenges themselves are anti-climactic but the emotion and power behind them captivate. Director/Writer Guillermo del Toro (Blade II, Hellboy) has certainly earned his seven Oscar nominations including best Foreign Film and Best Original Screenplay.

Factory Girl

Who would have thought that the hot, blond model chick disrespected by Jude Law could act? It's too bad her talent is wasted on a biopic that requires her to shallowly spiral from a happy-go-lucky socialite party girl to a depressed, indigent party girl. In what may be one of the toughest roles given to an actress this year, Sienna Miller dazzles as Edie Sedgwick, muse to Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) in the turbulent, drug-induced 60s. Edie falls in with the wrong crowd and gets swallowed up. Miller spends the majority of the flick dancing around Warhol and his "Factory" of druggie filmmakers and models. Trouble is, the screenplay doesn't give us much more. The film is a superficial attempt to tell Edie's story and while you wonder what she was really like, you find yourself counting the minutes to her predictable demise so that you can just go home and go to sleep. Wait for the DVD.

Lives of Others

'Tis the season for foreign films. Another subtitled movie comes down the pipeline to kick butt on anything we Americans could produce this season (except, of course, Dreamgirls, my fave). Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, Lives of Others had me in deep thought from the moment I left the theater. You know it's a good one when the 'ol gerbil can't hop off the wheel. Just prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, East Germany was all about spying on its citizens. So paranoid of subversive, anti-communist behavior, the secret police (Stasi) wiretapped everyone. And it's a good cover when you want to spy on a seemingly loyal playwright to get to his hot girlfriend. And that's just what the Stasi minister orders his lacky Gerd Wiesler to do. But the more Wiesler eavesdrops, the more he realizes how empty and lonely his life is and the more human he becomes. He becomes tangled in his subjects' lives to a tragic end. LOO surpasses the political thriller genre and drives home some universal societal fears. As the "war on terror" escalates how soon before our own freedoms, passions and ideals become silenced in the name of national security? This flick's a must-see.