MATCH POINT

In a rare interview with Woody Allen in a recent issue of "Entertainment Weekly" the director, commenting on his own body of work, said he always wished his strong suit had been drama but "it wasn't-my strong point was comedy."
 

In a career that now spans 36 films the indelible New York director takes a noticeable departure from his hometown, and his typical genre, for his latest film - a gut-wrenching tale of infidelity, moral ambiguity and social climbing called "Match Point."
 

One of Allen's most searing films to date, not to mention one of his least comedic inclined, "Match Point" is a straight-up thriller which proves the auteur isn't dead after allŠhe's just been hibernating.
  

Set in London, "Match Point" follows the upward rise of one-time professional tennis player Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyer). An Irish up-and-comer who never quite arrived, despite showing promise on the court, Chris shows up in London primed to take a comfortable but somewhat disappointing post as the tennis pro at a posh London club.
 

When he unexpectedly befriends the son of a wealthy businessman, Tom (Mathew Goode), he finds himself courting his new friend's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). The courtship leads to an unexpected run of good fortune as Chris finds himself the sudden benefactor of someone else's money and status.
       

Complicating matters, and threatening his new life (complete with a posh apartment and a plum job in his father-in-law's financial company), is a fling with his brother-in-law's fiancé (Scarlet Johansson). Nola, a struggling American actress despised by her mother-in-law-to-be, becomes Chris's obsessionŠalbeit one that is sweetest only when out of his reach.
       

Although "Match Point" isn't necessarily the darkest film Allen has made (you could point to "Interiors" or, to an extent, even "Husbands and Wives" for that), it is starkly devoid of the director's usual stylistic touches. Most noticeably the hero, or in this case the antihero, isn't played by Allen or an actor standing in for him.
 

Without Manhattan backdrops and a manic, nebbish hero in place, "Match Point" at first feels like something other than a Woody Allen film. And, while it certainly tackles many of the themes the director has been coming back to throughout his career (morality, guilt, retribution), it doesn't do so in typical Allen fashion. A sort of reinvisioned take on one of Allen's best films, "Crimes and Misdemeanors," "Match Point," like that film, is ultimately an homage to Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment;" it's a film that meditates on whether or not we can ever truly "get away" with the bad deeds we commit.
 

What's most unsettling about "Match Point" is that, without a manic Allen-esque character at its center, the film becomes much darker. Here our main character is in many ways the antithesis of the hero Allen has been delivering all these years; instead of an insecure intellectual we have an ambitious former athlete.

And although Rhys-Meyer's Chris is something of an outsider - he is poor and Irish when being rich and English is what's desired - he blends in so quickly and effectively that the transformation is all the more unsettling. There are no self-effacing jokes from the former tennis star, no outward verbalizations of concerns or fears, and in that respect Allen-the quintessential New York Jew-makes a bold move by finally taking himself out of the picture.
 

Of course for those who love the director, or have paid attention to his flops and achievements over the last 20 years, there are still signs that make the film indelibly his. They're subtle, but they're there. (The most obvious being the cruel almost-twist ending, which is nothing else if not the cruelest of jokes.)
 

But whether or not "Match Point" plays as a classic Woody Allen film or something else, a departure or a hybrid, it remains a thrilling and enjoyable caper that leaves you staggering instead of giggling.

 

In other words the director sold himself very short in that aforementioned interview: He can most assuredly do drama in an unmistakable effective way.

Grade: A-

Chronicles of Narnia:
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

In the barrage of well-cut trailers that have been airing to signal one of the biggest movies of the season, and a hoped-for cinematic franchise, "Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" looks to be a LOTR for a younger set. Based on CS Lewis's beloved series of books about a quartet of British children who escape into a magical world via a household wardrobe during World War II, the film is backed by big money and a literary lineage akin to the cultish following that Tolkien's books enjoyed.
 

Sadly this doesn't amount to much in the hands of director Adam Adamson, who helmed both "Shrek" and its sequel, and makes his disappointing live action debut here.
 

Full of stilted dialog, uninspired special effects and uneven storytelling "Narnia" is all flash and no substance; it dilutes the first book in Lewis's series to a tired tale of sibling rivalry and a film studio banking on talking animals to draw kids into theaters instead of solid moviemaking.
 

Beginning in London during the blitzkrieg, the first shots we got of the Pevensie clan are chaotic. As bombs descend on the city four children are awoken in the middle of the night and scramble to a backyard bunker, until the disagreeable Edmund (Skandar Keynes) makes an unwise decision to scramble back into the house for a framed photo of dad. Thankfully Edmund is saved in the nick of time, but not without a bit of brotherly animosity revealed in the process: the eldest, Peter (William Moseley), goes back for him and saves the day.
 

After the children are shipped off, along with so much of the city's youth, to stay with a family friend outside the city, they're left essentially to themselves in a massive mansion filled with antiques they're not to touch and various empty rooms. When the youngest, Lucy (Georgie Henley) discovers a magical world through a coat closet, the children wind up traveling to the wintery magical realm only to become embroiled in a battle between good and evil. Lauded as the foretold saviors of Narnia, these "sons of Adam and daughters of Eve" are thought to be the ones who will fight the evil White Witch (Tilda Swinton) and bring about peace and a return to more temperate weather in the process.
 

While much has been made of the positioning of "Narnia" as a Christian film (Walden and Disney, the production companies behind it marketed the movie expressly to churches and Christian groups), the film has more heavy handed biblical references than strong "Christian subtext."
 

 From the positioning of the benevolent leader, a lion named Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson), as a Christ-like figure who sacrifices himself and is resurrected to the various overtones of Biblical temptation themes as personified by Edmund who initially betrays his siblings by being seduced by a series of sins ranging from gluttony (he chows on Turkish Delights compliments of the White Witch) to power (he's further lured to her lair by the promise that he can one day be king of Narnia).
 

But in Adamson's hands these points feel less like allegory and more like plot point remnants from the book. Despite some initial visuals of Narnia, coated in a beautiful bed of white snow, the film devolved into a boring chase full of poorly animated talking beavers and other woodland creatures.
 

Even the-always-wonderful Tilda Swinton can't save this dismal affair. As various odd creatures turn up it seems as though Adamson has plucked extras from "LOTR" and "Star Wars" in attempting to fill out the unspecific, bizarre melding pot that is Narnia.
 

What Narnia ultimately lacks is the magic that Lewis's books held; the chilling, magical notion that an entire world existed past the fur coats in an upstairs closet. Here Narnia doesn't attain that magic because it looks like a less inspired vision of so many other magical realms we've seen of late, whether Middle Earth or Hogwarts. This snowy environ, which exists just beyond an ever-burning lamp post, doesn't delight but rather smacks of a Hollywood gimmick.

 

Maybe the hope is that, with millions of marketing dollars behind it, no one will notice what's actually on the screen. Hopefully audiences won't be so easily tricked.  

Grade: D