Blu-ray Review: Inception (2010)

Inception is absolutely ingenious and exhilaratingly original, but also staggeringly complex, necessitating a vast amount of exposition simply to give the first-time viewer a vague idea of what's going on. Even then, the film practically dares the audience to keep up with it; most will find the effort futile. Thankfully Nolan has plenty of fun assembling his multi-dimensional caper, building it to a thrilling crescendo in concert with Hans Zimmer's exemplary momentum-driving score. Even if much of the action would not be out of place in a film set in reality (or, at least, Hollywood's version of it), Nolan's layering of the action on top of itself - at one point, there are four levels of dreams in action - adds a jolt of innovation, not to mention exhilaration.

Inception's brazen complicatedness can work against it, however, with numerous conversations devolving into jargon-laden wedges of ungainly sentences. If the cast wasn't so unfailingly excellent, the script would seem leaden; fortunately, they handle it with almost effortless ease. As protagonist Cobb, DiCaprio, in one of his most challenging and successful roles yet (with some echoes of Shutter Island), is surrounded by faces that seem unlikely to populate a blockbuster but work precisely because of that fact. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is his sidekick, Michael Caine his little-seen father, Tom Hardy his dream engineer, and Ellen Paige his fresh-faced apprentice. It's Paige who provides the necessary window for the viewer: as a neophyte in the world of dream-stealing she has to be taught the rules of the game, thereby explaining it to the audience too.

The sequence in which Paige's Ariadne is introduced to dream space features many of the money shots from the trailer, including, most spectacularly, the streets of Paris folding back on themselves. It's something of a disappointment that such shattering of physics is then left mostly unemployed thereafter. The only major exception to this is Gordon-Levitt's zero-gravity corridor fight, the film's most entertaining and outlandish action sequence. Otherwise, the potential of the characters being in dreams remains largely unexplored. One of Nolan's central arguments though is that dreams feel real while we're in them, so his quest was for the appearance of reality in the dreamworld, with no visual markers like, say, The Matrix's green tint. That has led to much speculation and dissection regarding what within the film is actually a dream - is it all in Cobb's head? Such questions and ambiguities actually enhance the film in the long run, giving it a life well beyond its 150-minute runtime. This is no mere disposable entertainment. It may require some work to appreciate, but it's certainly worth it.

The film, like much of Nolan's oeuvre, and earning him comparisons with Kubrick, has been accused of emotional coldness, but the writer-director ensures that Cobb does have a personal motivation for his mission: haunted by visions of his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), he wants to get home to see his young children, but he is a fugitive on the run from the US authorities. Cotillard is a scene-stealer throughout, generating massive unease and unpredictability through simple glances and graceful movements. The involvement of Cobb's wife and children in proceedings adds immesurably to the stakes, as well as, ingeniously, making for a simultaneously cathartic and ambiguous ending. A second (and third) watch yields greater clarity and some answers, but the film's central mysteries remain both perplexing and compelling.

Release Information
Country: UK / Region: Free / Version: Triple Play / Discs: 2 BD, 1 DVD / Distributor: Warner Bros.

Presentation
I have honestly never heard LFE (low-frequency effects) so deep or pervasive as in this monster of a soundtrack. I actually remember it overpowering the cinema's sound system on my first viewing; I was similarly concerned with my own lowly subwoofer, but it handled the workout. The bass is tremendous, particularly when transitioning between the real and dream worlds, or between dream levels. Similarly, use of the three-dimensional sound space is top notch. The film has just won two Oscars for its sound, and rarely have those awards been so deserved. This barnstormer of a track is ably accompanied by an altogether superb, yet largely naturalistic, image. Wally Pfister's cinematography - also Oscar-winning - is very well represented.

One little minus point. With no resume play or bookmarking function, 15 chapter stops for a 2-and-a-half-hour movie does seem unnecessarily skimpy. Incidentally, the picture quality of the enclosed DVD copy is below par - there's ugly aliasing all over the place. Blu is the only way to go here.

Extras
It's only in this department that the Blu-ray release falls slightly short, despite being a 2-BD set. The lack of commentary is as anticipated given Nolan's reluctance to provide definitive answers, but surely this is a film that would warrant a comprehensive documentary - perhaps that would be just too conventional? Instead, we get WB's so-called Extraction Mode: a fancy name for a simple branching pod feature. The featurettes offered are very interesting and last about 45 minutes in all, but watching them branched into the movie is pointless (you can select them separately).

Disc 2 is sadly quite sparse. The main piece is a rather intellectual look at the science of dreams, fronted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which is a bit dry to really engage (45 mins). "The Cobol Job" is a 15-minute Motion Comic-style piece offering a prologue to the events of the film; it's intriguing if not revelatory. Other than trailers and a promotional art archive, the final offering is 10 tracks from Hans Zimmer's score provided in lush 5.1 DTS-HD. It's very welcome and deserved but does have the whiff of simply filling space on the disc.



Summary
I was harsh to Inception on release - probably due to a combination of expectation and befuddlement - but on repeat viewings the film that everyone else has been raving about has emerged for me. That's viewings, plural - since I've had it on Blu-ray this has proved to be a film that has kept calling me back for more, and I just can't get enough. It's certainly a visual and aural tour de force (with Hans Zimmer's best score in years, perhaps ever), and, though the script can be clunky and too verbose, the momentum generated by the editing, music, and sheer bravado pulls it through. It's cinema of real ambition, which should be applauded.

Blu-ray Review: Apocalypse Now (1979)

Helicopters circle. The jungle bursts into flames. "The End". The start of a masterpiece.

The beginning of Apocalypse Now is instantly recognisable now, but, as Coppola admits in his commentary here, was actually created somewhat by accident. The dreamlike montage was constructed out of discarded shots and the scene depicting a drunk Captain Willard (an actually drunk Martin Sheen) in a Saigon hotel room was not actually planned to be in the film. But add The Doors and some seminal sound design - Apocalypse Now pioneered the now-standard 5.1 surround sound system, never better utilised than with the opening sound effect of the swirling helicopter - and an iconic opening was born. It's for more than just show, however: the disorienting effect succinctly encapsulates Willard's fatigued mental state, and provides the first evidence that this is not going to be just another war film.

Francis Ford Coppola's 5-years-in-the-making follow up to the certified "Best Sequel Ever", The Godfather Part II, carried with it all the negative hype of a potential disaster. The budget had spiralled massively out of control; the Philippines shoot had dragged on and on for sixteen months, as opposed to the originally scheduled six weeks(!); the star suffered a mid-shoot heart attack, prompting Coppola's legendary "he's not dead until I say he's dead!" outburst; and the director was reportedly close to suicide. Over a million feet of film was shot, or roughly two hundred hours, which was part of the reason that the post-production alone took three years. Eventually, the negative buzz became so overwhelming that Coppola took it to Cannes in unfinished form to prove the doubters wrong. The rest, as they say, is history.

Regardless of its classic status, it must be said that Apocalypse Now certainly divided initial audiences, and still does to this day. It is completely unlike any war film before or since, depicting the chaos of the Vietnam conflict with a hint of surrealism and a definite off-kilter perspective. Coppola's aim was to show how war corrupts a man, and as his characters sail down the river everything gradually becomes more and more bizarre and unexpected, culminating in Marlon Brando's rambling (yet mesmerising) extended cameo. The genius of the film is that it pulls the viewer along on this journey; you feel like another passenger on the boat. Perhaps it is not as authentic an experience as, say, Platoon, but no other film captures so well the psychological effects of warfare and conveys them so completely to the viewer. No-one has ever accused Coppola of being unambitious, and if some of his (more recent) efforts have failed, at least commercially speaking, Apocalypse Now represents the height of his creative career.

In 2001 Coppola chose to go back and reinsert excised scenes to make the Redux version, which is closer to the film he originally showed at Cannes over two decades before. The added scenes, totalling 40 minutes or so (bringing the total running time to over 3 hours), proved to be controversial. None of them impact the plot, instead just taking the form of added vignettes on this episodic journey. The added French Plantation sequence bore most of the criticism, and it's easy to see why: it brings the narrative to a complete screeching halt for 15 minutes while new characters spout heavy-handed background information. A new scene in which Brando's Colonel Kurtz reads Time Magazine articles to the imprisoned Willard dents the mysteriousness of the character by showing him in full daylight, countering the oppressive shadow-drenched darkness of his other scenes. Nevertheless, while an ungainly beast, Apocalypse Now Redux remains a triumph. Such needless detours would never work in another film, but in the context of Coppola's insane endeavour they seem oddly fitting, only adding to its uniquely foreboding atmosphere.



Release Information
Country: US / Region: Free / Version: Special Edition / Discs: 2 / Distributor: Lionsgate.

Presentation
This is a carefully produced high-definition transfer, and it shows. For much of the film the print is damn near pristine, with a good (if not demo-worthy) level of detail and sometimes sumptuous colour. A big bonus is that the film is framed in its original 2.35:1 ratio, never before seen on any DVD/laserdisc releases. Several shots are clearly framed with the scope shape in mind, so it should never have been tampered with in the first place (cinematographer Vittorio Storaro championed a 2:1 crop for home viewing). The image quality only struggles with the predictably difficult Brando scenes at the end, swathed in shadow; here, crispness is reduced and some banding and inconsistent black levels interfere, though not catastrophically.

The sound... oh, the sound. You'd expect the film that invented the modern soundtrack to be noteworthy in that department, and, well, it is. Virtually every scene is continually active from an aural standpoint, the surround channels used expertly. The sound of swooping helicopters is virtually everpresent for the first half of the film, delivered with massive force and LFE through the DTS-HD track. A scene that impressed me particularly, however, was a more low-key one: as Willard and Chef take a walk in the jungle looking for mangoes, the soundscape teems with life and ambience. It even puts the sounds of Pandora's jungle in Avatar to shame.

Extras
The production of Apocalypse Now was so tortuous that it would make a fabulous film by itself - which of course it did, in the famous documentary Hearts of Darkness. It is finally offered for purchase in the US in a 3-disc Blu-ray set dubbed the "Full Disclosure" Edition. The version under review here, though, is the significantly cheaper 2-disc Special Edition. Both are region free.*

Both the theatrical cut and Redux are included, now sharing a single Blu-ray disc, while the extras occupy the second disc. Both cuts are accompanied by a Coppola commentary (the same commentary, just cleverly extended if you're watching Redux). As proven by Coppola's Godfather commentaries, he's an extremely entertaining talker, divulging anecdotes and reflections at a good rate, making this one of the best commentaries out there. This is the same commentary as found on the previous DVD edition.

Onto Disc 2. Two new, lengthy, interviews are included (in HD), in which Coppola chats with writer John Milius and Martin Sheen respectively. Both approach an hour in length, and are completely engaging and well worth watching in full. A third new piece is a shorter one looking at the casting of the film with Fred Roos.

The rest is ported from the previous DVD release. There is an extensive selection of deleted scenes, all with very poor picture quality but very interesting nonetheless. One of them, which runs for 15 minutes, basically just consists of Marlon Brando reading the entire poem "The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot, which is slightly excessive, but many will simply lap up any extra footage of the great man. A particularly intriguing scene shows the ultimate fate of Dennis Hopper's photojournalist; perhaps a surprising omission from the final film (and not reinserted for Redux). Two featurettes on the birth of 5.1 sound and a look at the helicopter flyover in the opening scene are sadly all too brief. Next up is a fascinating three-part documentary on the film's post-production, clocking in at about 45 minutes in total. Further featurettes look at the film's colour palette, the creation of the Redux version and some brief reminiscences from some of the cast.

*According to Amazon, a UK Blu-ray release from Optimum is due out in June, which includes Hearts of Darkness.



Summary
It could be argued that Apocalypse Now finished off Coppola as a filmmaker as it's his last truly great work. Nevertheless it concluded a decade the likes of which few, if any, other directors have ever experienced. A masterful film given almost perfect HD treatment.

Blu-ray Review: The Book of Eli (2010)

There's something uniquely compelling about the post-apocalypse. The barren landscapes, rudimentary technology, dilapidated settlements and their embittered populace are all visual concepts that come across well in film. It is perhaps an oversubscribed sub-genre of science fiction cinema now - in fact, most future Earths depicted on film seemed to have experienced some sort of cataclysmic event - but still, the inherent potential of the setting offers a rich vein of possibilities. The Book of Eli was released soon after fellow dystopic vision-of-the-future The Road, with which it shares a certain aesthetic similarity, although Eli has a more commercial bent.

There are certain tropes that post-apocalypse films have in common with the Western, of course - namely the often bleak surroundings inhabited by the characters, and that sense of frontier spirit that pervades such locales - and Eli sets itself up as a sort of neo-Western, initially. Eli (Denzel Washington) is your typical morally ambiguous man of few words, who emerges from the desert with an air of mystery. Shane/A Fistful of Dollars/High Plains Drifter, etc., come to mind. But Eli's on a quest - yes, involving the titular Book - so, unlike in a Western, he does not stop for long at the first town he comes to, despite its local despot's (a fairly reigned-in Gary Oldman) wishes to the contrary. Instead, he continues walking towards his destination, which he simply states is "west".

As you would guess, there's a lot of walking in Eli, some of it even in slow motion (to emphasise that he's really walking a long way, presumably), but it does mostly avoid the monotony that could entail. Partly it's through shameless employment of the conventions of the genre - yes, there is a biker gang, and yes, there are cannibals - and partly it's through that central MacGuffin, the book. (At first, the film does its best to hide the book's identity, but it's not hard to guess, and, fortunately, the reveal is not the film's big twist, which it saves for the end.) Eli's unshakeable sense of purpose lends a similar drive to the narrative, even though it's more mild curiosity at its ultimate goal, rather than real engrossment. The Hughes Brothers clearly want to make a film that is deeper than just surface entertainment, but they go too far sometimes; despite their best intentions, it's not particularly profound, and at times plods.

Denzel "Mr. Gravitas" Washington has no problems holding your attention, despite having little more apparent personality than his greying beard. He convinces as a complete badass in the action scenes, which are well staged by the Brothers Hughes; in particular, one early confrontation that takes place under a highway overpass, shown entirely in silhouette in one held shot, sticks in the mind. The visual style, though, is a bit more divisive: this has probably the most digitally manipulated colour palette yet seen, reducing everything to various shades of brown and grey. It certainly gets across the aridity and bleakness of the landscape, but it does tend to suffocate the life out of the excellent production design.



Release Information
Country: UK / Region: B / Version: N/A / Discs: 1 / Distributor: Entertainment In Video.

Presentation
Picture: Quandaries about the stylisation aside, there are problems with this transfer. The high contrast, almost monochrome look clearly gives the disc's encode difficulties; aliasing around sharp edges (such as windows), banding, and macroblocking (particularly in the cloud formations) are not rare. The clouds also sometimes have green tints, which seems out of place with the colour palette - but this may be intended. The picture is clean and grain-free, although a possible consequence of shooting with the Red One camera is that detail can get a bit smeary. It's not terrible, but I can only assume it's a different transfer from Warners' US release, which has received generally good write-ups.

Sound: Not as much to complain about here - convincing environmental effects envelop you throughout, and the action has a satisfying heft. Directionality is superb, a prime example being in the homestead siege. However, much of the dialogue is hushed whispers, which gets a little trying; you may have to fight the urge to yell "Speak up!"

Extras
Sadly WB's Maximum Movie Mode is not ported over, but the Picture in Picture track is still pretty decent. The separate featurettes total about 45 minutes, and treat the film reverentially. There's a short Motion Comic-style piece giving Carnegie (Oldman's character) some backstory. The deleted scenes are brief.



Summary
More been there, done that than anything truly new, The Book of Eli is serviceable fare that aims for profundity but achieves, at best, only some small resonance. There's never quite enough to keep you hooked.

Feature: Review of 2010

Welcome to FilmVerdict's now-perennial look back at the previous year of films. As usual, it takes the form of a list of the 10 films I liked most in the year just gone. It's not given in strictly an order of quality; rather, it simply reflects my level of affection for each film seen during the given 12 months. Do keep in mind that I didn't see nearly as many new films in 2010 as I would have liked, so I don't claim that this list is exhaustive or definitive. Click the provided links to go to the review of each title (where one has been written) - and don't be surprised to find that my opinions have changed from first viewing!





10. The Princess and the Frog [Cinema Review] - Disney's return to hand-drawn animation was a big success for me, resulting in probably the best traditional Disney since The Lion King. The songs are toe-tapping, if not particularly catchy, and the characters are enormously endearing. Best of all though is the artwork - a sumptuous, romanticised recreation of jazz-era New Orleans.




9. The American - This is the first of two films on this list that I watched on a plane and I don't feel such conditions give you a true impression of a film - hence the lack of a review - but I do know that I was gripped by The American throughout. Its Day of the Jackal-esque examination of the minutiae of an assassin's life is absorbing in its moral conflictions, while the thoughtful pacing is an ideal match for the material.




8. Green Zone [Blu-ray Review] - Underrated much? Paul Greengrass and Matt Damon's first collaboration that isn't Bourne was a film with just as much energy and thrilling action. It may not have as much to say about the Iraq war as it might promise to, but as a compelling thriller with a real-world canvas, it further reinforces Greengrass's reputation as amongst the best in the business.




7. The Ghost - Who knows how Roman Polanski's career would have gone had he been available to work in America for the last thirty years. What we do know is that he has still been able to crank out a few works of a master in his European exile. The Pianist is one; Frantic, perhaps, another - and The Ghost certainly belongs in that category. In tone and feel it's surprisingly close to Polanski's Chinatown, keeping you in its vice-grip until the inevitably unforeseen end. Its great achievement is the atmosphere of dread that is built up despite not much actually occurring to justify it, and confirms Polanski as one of the greatest purveyors of such unease since Hitchcock.




6. The Lovely Bones [Blu-ray Review] - Call me a Peter Jackson apologist, but I was a complete sucker for The Lovely Bones. I don't find its representation of "the in-between" (a limbo of sorts) completely convincing, and there's one CGI-overload montage that is utterly cringemaking, but nevertheless the film emphatically won me over. The two main performances - Saoirse Ronan and Stanley Tucci - are both exceptional, and Jackson shows a directorial flair that sometimes had got lost amidst the spectacle of prior efforts.




5. Toy Story 3 [Cinema Review] - Full disclosure time: Toy Story 3 is a brilliant film - faultless, perhaps - but I still feel a slight emotional disconnect with CG animation as opposed to their best hand-drawn brethren or live action. It's a rare CG film (such as The Incredibles) that really manages to worm its way into my most-watched pile. As such, this film that I rated 5 stars finds itself ranked below some others that I, in general, found more faults with. Toy Story 3 remains an incredible achievement though, besting the first sequel by some margin and sometimes touching quality of the original.




4. The Social Network - The other film on this list that I enjoyed at 36,000 feet, I can't be completely sure of The Social Network's ranking here before I watch it again, but I love the typically Sorkinese dialect spoken by the characters, and the intricacy and tempo of the editing. David Fincher's presence at the reigns is as low-key as I can remember it in a film, but that is an observation rather than a criticism. It's a film of people talking and typing, and as such it's incredible just how much drama and excitement the Fincher/Sorkin dream team inject into the potentially mundane.




3. Unstoppable [Cinema Review] - Unexpected. Undemanding. Unapologetic. Unstoppable is the ultimate edge-of-seat nailbiter. Yes, I enjoyed it that much. (Going by its Rotten Tomatoes score - 86% - I'm not the only one.)




2. Inception [Cinema Review] - I was harsh to Inception on release - probably due to a combination of expectation and befuddlement - but on repeat viewings the film that everyone else has been raving about has emerged for me. That's viewings, plural - since I've had it on Blu-ray this has proved to be a film that has kept calling me back for more, and I just can't get enough. It's certainly a visual and aural tour de force (Hans Zimmer's best score in years, perhaps ever), and, though the script can be clunky and too verbose, the momentum generated by the editing, music, and sheer bravado pulls it through. It also helps that the plot becomes slightly clearer on repeat viewings, albeit still impenetrable on occasion.




1. The King's Speech [Joel's Cinema Review] - The problem with Top 10 lists from a UK perspective is that a lot of the Oscar hopefuls, often some of the best films of the year, come out here in January or February, having reached US cinemas a couple of months earlier. That means that UK lists can look a year out of date. The King's Speech was released on Jan 7 on these shores, but I saw it on December 31 in Australia - therefore, I'm putting it on the 2010 list. It's an absolute masterpiece, and will be a deserved winner of the Best Picture Oscar should it achieve that, as it looks destined to. Basically it's a two-hander between Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush; the former of which looks set to take home the gold man, but arguably it's the latter who brings most warmth, humour and humanity. Meanwhile the supporting players are superb too, notably Helena Bonham Carter as the future Queen Mum and Guy Pearce as Edward VIII (only Timothy Spall as a caricature of Winston Churchill strikes a bum note). For a film with a relatively small budget, director Tom Hooper - who impressed me a lot with HBO's John Adams and Brian Clough biopic The Damned United - brings a commendable sense of period and even some scale. It's impeccable craftmanship, and completely undeserving of any barbs pointed at stuffy British heritage cinema. Majestic.



Honourable Mentions
The Town, Clash of the Titans, The Expendables, Kick-Ass, Iron Man 2, Edge of Darkness, The Last Station, Robin Hood, Shutter Island, Tron: Legacy, A Single Man.

2010, over and out.

Blu-ray Review: The Town (2010)

Few actors-turned-directors have made more impressive starts to their career behind the camera than Ben Affleck did with Gone Baby Gone. Mature, gripping, and with a superb sense for capturing his hometown of Boston, the film was quite the calling card. He returns to similar territory with The Town (geographically and thematically), a follow-up with a bigger scale and loftier ambitions. Affleck makes the task even more challenging for himself by also taking on the lead role. For a guy whose career was seemingly in the post-Gigli gutter just a few years ago, he has certainly gone a long way towards reinventing himself.

The titular 'Town' is Charlestown, an area in Boston across the river from the city's downtown. As an opening text tells us, its square mile has been the breeding ground for more bank robbers than anywhere else in America. The story focuses on a group of four such bank robbers, led by Affleck's Doug MacRay. Soon after one heist, Affleck finds himself drawn to the manager of the bank, played by Rebecca Hall, striking up a romantic relationship while she remains unaware of his misdeeds. The hint of melodrama inherent in that synopsis indicates one of the film's only real failings: it's sometimes a little too far-fetched to truly convince. Otherwise, the depiction of the life of Boston criminals reeks of seedy authenticity; these are not guys who live millionaires' lifestyles, preferring to blow most of their misbegotten cash on drugs or booze.

Affleck plays both the de facto leader and the most level-headed of the bunch. It's partly due to the nature of his character - he's mostly detached and low-key - but he's thoroughly eclipsed on the acting front by Jeremy Renner as the posse's resident loose cannon, Jem. Renner is a screen psycho in the best sense, never overplaying the character's volatility but also never leaving you in any doubt that he could explode into violence at any time. A scene in which Jem uncovers Doug and Claire's tryst is memorably tense mainly due to Renner's dangerous presence. Hall hits the right notes too with her character, sufficiently vulnerable but never helpless; she's only hamstrung by her character's slightly implausible actions near the end (which do admittedly work in a dramatic context).

The film is punctuated by three main action sequences, roughly at the start, middle and end, all heists in differing circumstances and all very well handled by the actor-director. In particular a car chase and lengthy climactic shootout are superbly edited and paced. The strength of these scenes and some of the minor ones goes some way to compensate for a choppy pace that flags from time to time. Some characters also seem underserved, such as Jon Hamm's FBI Agent Frawley and Blake Lively's Krista; the problem is addressed somewhat in the extended cut included on this disc, but the pacing issue is never fully resolved. Still, it remains an accomplished and assured work from an emerging talent who clearly has much more to give both in front and behind the camera.



Release Information
Country: UK / Region: Free / Version: Extended Cut, Triple Play / Discs: 1 BD, 1 DVD / Distributor: Warner Bros.

Presentation
The Town's Blu-ray transfer is as solid as they come: nice rich colours (particularly blues - Affleck mentions in the commentary that he shot with tungsten film stock), healthy contrast, and light grain. It shows how good file compression is getting that despite a low bitrate - sometimes barely double that of a DVD - the image exhibits no noticeable compression-related shortcomings. The soundtrack is not the most enveloping, but it's crisp and clear, and the soundfield does open up appropriately when bullets start to fly.

Extras
An apparently meagre selection looks more substantial if one includes the extended cut as a bonus feature (it's not available on DVD). 25 minutes longer, it's not an improvement but is an interesting alternate version nonetheless. Mainly, more screentime is given to the love interest plotline. Ben Affleck's commentary, duplicated on both cuts but edited accordingly, is excellent - the sort of great commentary that can enhance your view of the film it accompanies. Six "Focus Points", half an hour in total, give a glimpse inside the production but more would have been welcome.



Summary
A satisfying action film for grown-ups: a rare breed indeed in recent years. The Town dodges its shortcomings through the passion and commitment of its cast and crew.