Thrills! Spills! Apocalypse!

Plus: Almodovar returns with the masterful Broken Embraces

(Feb. 4, 2010) Previews

Set in the ’60s, the British coming-of-age film An Education centers on Jenny (in an acclaimed performance by Carey Mulligan), an Oxford-bound student who gets sucked into the orbit of a man (Peter Sarsgaard) twice her age. Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material involving sexual content, and for smoking. 95m. At the Minor.

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Based on the Nicholas Spark novel, Dear John is about a young woman (Amanda Seyfried) who falls in love with a soldier (Channing Tatum) on leave. Rated PG-13 for some sensuality and violence. 105m. At the Broadway and Mill Creek.

The thriller From Paris with Love stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers as an aide in the U.S. ambassador’s office in Paris and John Travolta as an FBI agent. They team up to foil a terrorist plot. Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout, drug content, pervasive language and brief sexuality. 92m. At the Broadway, Fortuna and Mill Creek.

Reviews

EDGE OF DARKNESS: Based on the 1980s BBC TV series of the same name, Edge of Darkness is a competently executed thriller/revenge tale. The film begins with images that will only make sense later in the story: We see three dead bodies pop to the surface in a river at night, followed by what appears to be a video of a young child playing by an ocean with presumably her father’s voice in the background as he captures his daughter’s playful antics.

This conjunction of innocence and evil informs the universe of this film — except, as we discover, innocence is in very short supply. Mel Gibson, appropriately grim and driven, is Boston detective Thomas Craven, whose visiting daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic, Drag Me to Hell), is shot down right next to him outside his house.

Initially believing he was the intended target, Craven soon discovers that his daughter, who worked for private government contractor Northmoore, was a potential whistleblower involved in a plot to reveal the company’s illegal activities. The attempt to revenge Emma’s death, then, also becomes the story of one man trying to unravel the dealings of our government and one of its arms contractors. While the company’s executives are evil, it will surprise few viewers that an elected official is the slimiest character.

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