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GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK In his second stint as director, George Clooney (who also co-wrote and co-stars) looks at an inspiring moment in US history, when legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) did the unthinkable by standing up to Joe McCarthy, the junior Senator who was destroying lives left and right in his maniacal pursuit of Communist infiltrators. Clooney has his sights set, and the targets are all big game. Like All the President's Men, the movie celebrates journalistic integrity in the face of political corruption, and like Quiz Show, it shows how this marvelous invention that has the ability to educate millions of Americans simultaneously has instead been dumbed down to placate the lowest common denominator (in the grand scheme of things, it didn't take long for Edward R. Murrow to be replaced by Trading Spouses). Comparisons to the insidious Bush Administration abound, and Clooney decries the lack of modern-day media heroes who could compare with Murrow. ***H1/2
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE The fourth installment in the J.K. Rowling screen franchise clearly isn't afraid of the dark. There's a reason that this is the first movie in the series to earn a PG-13 rating, as director Mike Newell, the first British director attached to this veddy British series, and scripter Steve Kloves, forced to whittle down Rowling's enormous tome, steadfastly refuse to coddle the youngest audience members, "family film" status be damned. The series' greatest strength -- namely, the dead-on portrayals by Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as Harry, Ron and Hermione -- never fails to deliver (these kids are wonderful together), and even an overstuffed plot doesn't slow down the proceedings as much as convey that there's much at stake in Harry's increasingly sinister world. ***
THE ICE HARVEST The Ice Harvest is being promoted as this year's Bad Santa, but it's just bad, period. It goes through the motions by displaying all the requisite black humor and hipster stylings without stopping to figure out what generally makes these ingredients work. John Cusack stars as Charlie Arglist, a Wichita lawyer who, with his partner Vic (Billy Bob Thornton), steals over two million dollars from a local mob boss (Randy Quaid) and then begins to sweat when an ice storm prevents them from skipping town. As Charlie trudges around the city waiting to make his great escape, he repeatedly bumps into two acquaintances: Renata (Connie Nielsen), a strip club owner, and Pete (hilarious Oliver Platt, the film's lone bright spot), a vulgar souse. As an exercise in neo-noir, the film is surprisingly inert, and as a dark comedy, it fails to offer any substantial laughs. *1/2
JARHEAD In adapting Anthony Swofford's book about Marines bored by their experience during the Gulf War, director Sam Mendes and scripter William Broyles Jr. have made a movie that isn't exactly a war movie or an anti-war movie; if anything, it's the pioneer in the new genre of the semi-war movie. Jarhead is about warriors without a war, men who have been primed to kill and are then denied that opportunity. Mendes and his actors (led by Jake Gyllenhaal) do an admirable job of punching across this frustration, and our sympathies are with these characters even if we don't exactly endorse the reasons for their mental morass. Jarhead does its best to remain apolitical, yet the very nature of the piece insures that correlations can be made to the current debacle in the Middle East. Mendes may have been reluctant to offend the war hawks, but history can't afford a similar luxury: It's too busy repeating itself to balk. ***
KISS KISS, BANG BANG Scripter Shane Black, best known for penning Lethal Weapon, makes his directorial debut with this fast and furious yarn that isn't a buddy/action movie as much as a send-up of a buddy/action movie. Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer are both in top form, respectively playing a none-too-bright thief who gets mistaken for an actor and the gay private eye assigned to prepare him for his screen test. The murder-mystery plot becomes needlessly complicated and doesn't hang together all that well, resulting in a tendency for the picture to move forward in fits and starts. But for the most part, this is sharp entertainment, as numerous Hollywood cliches are gleefully turned inside out. As scathing indictments of Tinseltown go, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang may not be The Player, but it's a player nonetheless. ***
