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When Michael Bay was announced as the director of Transformers, a big-screen version of the ’80s cartoon franchise about alien robots who hide among humanity disguised as vehicles and other machines, it seemed like the perfect match of director and subject; whether that’s a compliment or an insult is a matter of your perspective. Bay’s movies (Bad Boys II, Armageddon) have always looked like a bizarre hybrid of truck commercials, Army recruitment ads and country-music videos: high-gloss, quick-cut, back-lit visions with an emphasis on surface sheen and a minimum of scripting or storytelling to get in the way of the next explosion or action moment. Transformers may represent the ultimate symbiosis of director and subject: Transformers is, in many ways, a long-form commercial, co-produced by Paramount, DreamWorks … and toy manufacturer Hasbro.

Transformers, the movie, may sell Transformers, the toys, but it doesn’t do much of anything else. You can’t go into Transformers expecting it to make a lot of sense, or to work as science fiction (it is a movie about giant robots who shift shape, after all) but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that it could, at least, be competently and coherently made, which it isn’t. There’s no rhythm to the big moments of action — they’re too quickly-cut and closely-shot to be clear or comprehensible — and the script, credited to Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, is littered with failures in both simple taste and basic storytelling.

The human characters are as stiff and inhuman as the robots; they include Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf), a young man who we first meet when he’s presenting his explorer grandfather’s personal effects as part of a high school genealogy project, and trying to sell them to finance his first car. Sam’s great-grandfather explored the North Pole, but came back home a shattered man, ranting and raving about some “Ice Man” he’d seen in an underground crevasse. Sam’s search for wheels brings him to a low-rent used car lot, where a older Camaro catches his eye — and, it turns out, vice-versa: The Camaro’s, yes, a robot in disguise, there to protect Sam and help find one of the film’s central plot devices. Meanwhile, an Army base in Qatar is approached by a helicopter — which all records say was lost in Afghanistan three years ago. The helicopter then reveals itself as one of the bad robots, blowing up the base as part of an effort to hack into the Defense Department’s computer networks.

This all comes after a thick, gravy-like serving of exposition that opens the film, explaining where the good and bad robots come from, and how they’re all hot on the trail of something called the “All-Spark,” a huge, massively powerful whatsit that gives the robots something to fight over. And again, I don’t know how you could come up with any plot that could make Transformers plausible, but the problem here isn’t the plot (or, more correctly, isn’t just the plot); it’s in the execution, in the dialogue, in the tone and feel and shaping of the film. There’s not a single scene in Transformers that doesn’t contain either some leaden, limp cliché or some basic failure of good storytelling. Of course, Sam’s unattainable dream girl Mikaela (Megan Fox) is a stone-cold hottie who knows cars and engines inside and out; of course, our group of soldiers under attack in Qatar is led by the dedicated Sergeant Lennox (Josh Duhamel), who only wants to get home to see his wife and baby girl.

But complaining that a multi-million dollar summer movie contains clichés is like complaining a multi-million dollar house contains bricks; the problem isn’t the material but the shape of the construction — and the mortar of dialogue, character and scripting that’s supposed to make the cliché’s connect. When we first meet the good-guy Autobots, a big moment in a big movie clearly aimed at kids, why does the first thing out of the mouth of the Porsche-robot Jazz have to be “What’s up, little bitches?” When our hero-bot, Optimus Prime, destroys Sam’s family’s bird bath, why does he say “Oops — My bad,” as if he were a 16-year-old mall girl instead of a 16-ton robot? When the requisite shadowy government agency who knows about the aliens (see also Predator 2, Independence Day, Men in Black) shows up, why does the film have to neuter any sense of menace or suspense by having their leader played by John Tuturro, giving a goofy, goony performance that punctures scenes before they even start? When the shadowy government agency has captured Sam’s car, Bumblebee, and Sam insists on seeing him before he’ll help save the day, why does Duhamel’s soldier pull his gun to back up Sam’s request — despite Duhamel and LaBeouf not having shared so much of a line of on-screen dialogue? And why does the film have to have the faintly racist idea that comedic relief consists of, mostly, Black men (Bernie Mac, Anthony Anderson) shouting at women?

None of the elements above are unexpected (or even unappreciated) in a mega-million action thriller: Snappy introductions, threatening agencies, heroes bonding and backing each other, a smattering of comedy. They’re all part of the muscle and marrow of genre entertainment. But they’re so badly handled here (and bear in mind that this is just a top-of-my-head list) that they feel like watching a drunk figure skater weave and stumble through the compulsory exercises, hoping they’ll pull it together for the big finish. But then again, I heard someone outside my screening of Transformers say – without irony or sarcasm – that “It’s not about the script; it’s about the CG.” That may be one of the most chilling things I’ve ever heard from a moviegoer, suggesting a world view where, to paraphrase 1984, if you want a picture of the future of entertainment, picture a CGI boot stamping on a human face – forever.

But the fact is that the effects in Transformers, even in the film-ending robotcalypse, are poorly-shot and framed. There are precious few long, stable shots of the transformers, uh, transforming; They’re mostly done fast and up-close as if trying to distract us from how clumsy the effects are. And the long-shots commit another cardinal sin of computer-generated effects, where the massive, metallic good and bad robots move with no sense of gravity or inertia, just the hollow flimsiness of a Mylar balloon. Just as Peter Jackson’s King Kong was hurt by moments where the title ape moved like a blow-up doll and not a flesh-and-bone mammal, the robots here feel like hollow shells made of tinfoil and fishing line, not huge hulks of alloy and metal.

I am not predisposed to dislike summer entertainment and genre films; in fact, I’m predisposed to like them a little too much. I could watch Spider-Man II or The Empire Strikes Back or X-Men 2 or Aliens (all huge franchises, all huge sequels, all heavy on special effects) over and over again. And I have, because for all of their money and gloss, they’re well-written, well-constructed, well-made movies about human beings, made by people who understood that all the groovy effects and high-concept ideas you can imagine fall flat and lie there rotting without a structure of human feeling and intelligent writing to support them. Transformers is supposedly about robots who turn into cars and back again; what it’s really about is big Hollywood turning money into stupid and back again – because as bad as Transformers is, it’s going to make cash hand over fist as long as audiences want their major motion pictures giving them spectacle instead of storytelling and junk effects instead of real entertainment.

– From my Cinematical review

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In the Loop, which was picked up for U.S. release by IFC at Sundance, seemed tailor-made for easy summations: “It’s The Office meets The West Wing,” the early-screening set said, along with raving endorsements about how funny In the Loop actually was. And the latter part of that was proven right when I saw In the Loop at Sundance; it’s achingly, wrenchingly, dizzyingly funny, with a bleak, bitter sense of humor that makes each laugh feel like the people behind In the Loop are not so much tickling your funny bone as they are going at it with an ice pick.

And yes, In the Loop has the handheld-yet-slightly-too-steady camerawork of The Office, where the comedy of uncomfortable silence builds and builds as the camera lingers and stays on, and it also has the petty rivalries and silly squabbles of The Office; it seems that whether you’re selling paper or pushing it, work is work. And In the Loop also has the insider-y, rushed feeling of The West Wing, where many scenes are done as a walk-and-talk and we’re reminded that they talk about the corridors of power because that’s usually where the deals get cut.

But In the Loop also transcends those easy comparisons, and does so to great effect. The idea that government is as messy and petty and foolish as any other workplace is scary, and funny; the insider’s view of politics in it isn’t warm walk-and-talk idealism but the ugly, mean pragmatism of the stalk-and-talk, or even the prowl-and-growl. On the surface level, In the Loop is The Office meets The West Wing, sure; what it winds up feeling more like is as if John Cleese and George Orwell wrote Dr. Strangelove for our media-soaked age where wars are conducted in part through press releases and focus groups, or Catch-22 for the 24/7 news era.

During an trivial radio interview, Minister for International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) is asked about the war — nobody says with who, but it may or may not be coming, and Britain may or may not stand alongside America, and it’ll take place in the Middle East. Foster, caught aback, does the worst thing a modern politician can do, and actually says something with a clear meaning, offering that war is “unforeseeable.” The clip catches the attention of Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications, which Capaldi — spitting terse profanities and imperatives through sharp teeth — makes clear is not something you want to do.

Malcolm is furious, but then again, that’s like saying the Pacific Ocean is moist; Malcolm exists in a state of perpetual anger, spitting out brief, brutal nickname-insults at those who have wronged him with a gaunt, ghoulish air that suggests he exists on a high-protein, low-carb diet of the corpses of the enemies he has defeated and the underlings who have disappointed. He rages at Simon to try and patch up the gaffe without actually reversing it: “All sorts of things that are likely are also unforeseeable!”

That that line — delivered with the scorn of an angry god by a highly-placed but unelected political player to a cowering Minister more concerned with his resume and connections than his riding of constituents — was funny, but it also showed a backbone and brain that made In the Loop one of the highlights of the Sundance Film Festival. “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell wrote that in 1946, in his under-read and unheeded “Politics and the English Language,” and it is very funny — and very sad, which is why it has to be funny, because then it would be unendurable — to watch In the Loop and recognize how in a very different world, so little is different. Or, as Malcolm notes later on, “I have spoken to the Prime Minister — whether it’s happened or not is irrelevant.” Malcolm, in the famous words of both a Bush administration source and Orwell’s Big Brother, creates his own reality; problem is, we have to live in it.

Of course, this may not be the first thing you notice watching In the Loop; the smart stuff is buried under sweary, shouty slapstick and very English aghast embarrassed silences. Malcolm spits out insults as new nicknames when he’s angry, which is to say constantly, so that Simon’s new fresh-faced advisor Toby (Chris Addison), busy making things worse, is called “Frodo” and “Ron Weasley”; James Gandolfini’s American military man trying to stop the war is “General Flintstone”; a not-so-innocent bystander gets “the baby from Eraserhead.”

And the screenwriting team — Iannuci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche, with “additional dialogue” by Ian Martin, who the press notes name as ’swearing consultant’ — also have a rich, ripe love of language and absurdity. An American analyst (Anna Chlumsky) writes the controversial paper “Post-War Planning: Parameters, Implications and Possibilities” — which leads to a sputtering salvo of angry officials trying to bury or praise what they call “PWIPPP” in a spray of syllables. When Malcolm orders Simon to recant, he says that it’ll be “easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy.” Simon is doubtful: “No, it’s going to be difficult-difficult-lemon-difficult.”

In the Loop has such intricate and layered jokes, such carefully called-back and smartly referenced running gags that they go beyond comedic genius and into sheer dramatic brilliance. It’s got the rat-a-tat dialogue of His Girl Friday and the roaring rage of a Mamet play. Yes, In the Loop is beautifully profane, but it’s also a great, cruel political comedy that is actually funny and, more surprisingly, actually political. It’s been suggested that In the Loop may not play so well in the Obama era, and that people may not care to see a reminder of the now-bygone Bush years. Obama is the new President of the United States, but he isn’t some magically empowered figure like Willy Wonka of the Chocolate Factory or Kal-El of Krypton, and we’d be wise to remember that. Even with inaugural fever running through Sundance like Jonas Brothers madness through a gaggle of girls, the inaugural did not immediately bring American troops home, create peace in the world, erase the financial and human cost of the Iraq war and guarantee that our civil servants would be altruistic, selfless secular saints; In the Loop was inspired by the Iraq war, but it’ll be just as funny — which is just as depressing — viewed in preparation for the next one.

That’s because governments are made of people, and we know what people are like, and so does In the Loop. A great sub-plot has Simon, run from pillar to post dealing with the possibility of war and his sudden nomination as head cheerleader for it, being driven mad by a seemingly inconsequential constituent’s problem back home. Simon doesn’t get it straightened out, because he has bigger fish to fry, but of course he’s less concerned with frying fish than he is saving his bacon, and everything goes wrong, wrong, wrong. The American version of In the Loop would undoubtedly, assuredly include at least one character trying to do the right thing for the right reason and good would win out in time for the happy end; what makes In the Loop so painfully funny is that there’s no right thing, and no right reason, and the bad sleep well with no end in sight.

– from Cinematical.com

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In “Year One,” Jack Black and Michael Cera play Zed and Oh, hipster primitives exiled from their prehistoric village who find themselves bumping into a who’s who of the Book of Genesis before getting caught up in the affairs of the day as they make their way to Sodom. (You may have heard of it — right next to Gomorrah? Kind of a party town?) With Black’s manic modern manner and Cera’s 21st-century self-consciousness wrapped up in loincloths and togas, “Year One” promises the kind of stupid-smart highbrow-lowbrow goofiness Mel Brooks gave us in “History of the World: Part 1.”

And that’s partially correct, in that “Year One” is the kind of stuff Mel Brooks would have whipped up back in the day — and, frankly, whipped through in about a half-hour. “Year One” is full of funny people and funny moments, but they hang and dangle in a movie that’s awkwardly, embarrassingly long, where the running time stretches out and dilutes the laughs down to almost nothing. Black and Cera are both game, and the movie gets some mileage out of the contrast between their modern manners and their primitive times, or primitive things said with calm and cheer. Advising Cera’s Oh on how to woo a girl in the village, Black’s Zed is nonchalant: “Hit her on the head – women really respond to that.”"

– From my MSN Review

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“Based on journalist Mark Boal’s real experiences following bomb disposal experts in Iraq, The Hurt Locker isn’t just a welcome return to big-screen action from director Kathryn Bigelow (who has wrung both fame and infamy from her art with Near Dark, Strange Days and Point Break). It’s an assured, confident, swaggering piece of moviemaking that manages to not only evoke every war of the 20th century but also, despite the claims by makers and some reviewers that it’s an ‘apolitical’ film, speaks very specifically to the Iraq war. Even so, plunging us into the thick of things alongside the highly-trained men (and they’re all men here) who defuse bombs for the Army, Bigelow and Boal avoid the speeches and postures and long, contemplative talks of home front films like Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Elah by staying in Iraq, and they shun the loopy, loony formal experiments of Brian De Palma’s Redacted. Boal and Bigelow stay laser-focused on one group of men with a singular mission, and make us live in the constant possibility of death. Viewed from half a world away, a bomb is a political concern; viewed from less than a foot away, a bomb’s just a high-stakes exercise in problem-solving, where making a mistake means a final, terminal education in the physics of expanding gases.

… The Hurt Locker was picked up in Toronto by Summit Entertainment, which means it’ll be coming to a theater near you at some hypothetical future point; you’ll want to see it at a theater near you, in fact, on the largest possible screen with the best possible sound. War is awful, but on a certain level, war movies are awesome, and Bigelow knows that. Bigelow’s a terrific action director, but the industry doesn’t offer her the chance to demonstrate that as often as you might like; it could be sexism or just the bad juju that sticks to some directors that explains that, but either way Bigelow blows both those off the screen along with everything else in a blast of Dolby splendor and big-screen spectacle. The Hurt Locker looks and feels like a terrific action film, but there’s a piece of art ticking away within it that goes off inside your head and your heart while you’re watching.”

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Denzel Washington taking on 'Pelham 1 2 3'

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“I am not one of those film-nerds who protests at great length and in great detail when one of his favorite films is remade — which is to say that in fact I am — and yet, the worst thing I can say about Tony Scott’s re-make of the 1974 action B-movie classic The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is that it’s a pleasant enough way to spend two hours watching things get tense, move fast and blow up. That’s it; that’s all.

The new Pelham isn’t even bad; it’s expensive, impressive, full of good actors in parts large and small. But while it has the plot of the original — where a man-with-a-plan criminal (Travolta here, Robert Shaw in the original) takes a New York City subway train hostage and a civil servant in the subway system’s offices (Denzel Washington here, Walter Matthau in the original) winds up being the point man in the city’s response to the crisis. The biggest difference between the new and old versions of the story isn’t in the changes screenwriter Brian Helgeland (Payback, L.A. Confidential) makes in the script or the camera style of director Tony Scott (Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State); it’s that the original Pelham felt like a great New York story with a crime movie inside it, while the new Pelham feels like a perfectly average crime film that happens to take place in New York. You will not be talking about The Taking of Pelham One Two Three around the water cooler on Monday; you may not even feel the need to talk about it around the water fountain right after you see it.”

– from my Redbox Review

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“I was thinking about doing a Halloween recommendation this week, but between you and me, Halloween? I’m kind of over it. One costume party, two mini-peanut-butter-cups and I’m pretty much fine for 2007. And in the movie business every day is Halloween, with executives digging up long-buried plots and resurrecting them as remakes that lurch into our field of view like zombies, staggering and shambling and only rarely as lively as they were the first time around. For example, there’s this week’s news that Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide) was going to be re-making the 1974 crime classic The Taking of Pelham One Two Three with Denzel Washington in the lead and John Travolta as the bad guy. Part of me has no objection to this — Pelham has a perfectly good story that could survive an update — but part of me has every objection to this: Pelham’s a perfectly good movie that doesn’t need to be updated, a shining light from the long-past age of entertaining movies for grown-ups.

Because once upon a time, Hollywood made movies that were released as entertainment, as fun, as something to watch on a Saturday. That doesn’t mean these movies couldn’t be good, but it did mean that they were free from the burden of expectation in a way many modern films aren’t. It feels, in 2007, as if every film has to either make money hand-over-fist in record-breaking amounts, or earn Golden Globe or Oscar nominations and wins (and a smaller, yet dignified amount of money, too). And this can lead us to feel like we’re being offered only the choice between either huge, noisy tripe like Transformers or earnest, leaden trudges through the theater like Into the Wild; it’s as if restaurants offered nothing but huge, half-molten ice cream sundaes or sparse plates of artfully arranged steamed broccoli. But before that schism (which some would place around the release of Star Wars, but that’s another column), Hollywood could, and would, put out releases with no more hope than that they might be entertaining, well-made movies designed for grown-ups — in other words, a movie like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

The pitch is simple: Four men hijack a New York City subway train. They’re calculating, well-prepared, have color code-names (which Tarantino rips off for Reservoir Dogs, but again I digress) and they’re led by the sinister, snarling Robert Shaw as Mr. Blue. They have 18 people on the train; if they don’t get a million dollars in an hour, they start throwing bodies off the back of it. And the only man who can stop them is subway cop Zach Garber, played by…Walter Matthau. Yes, jowly, wobbly Walter Matthau, which is another reason The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is intrinsically awesome; it’d be one thing if our hero cop were a chiseled, jut-jawed hero with zero percent body fat, but he’s not; he’s a guy in a bad jacket and a wide tie, trying to do his job. Denzel Washington will take the part of Garber in the new Pelham — and we could do far worse — but, for the record, consider this my formal suggestion for Mr. Washington to gain at least 50 pounds to properly prepare for following in Mr. Matthau’s footsteps. Pelham’s finale doesn’t revolve around Matthau’s Garber shooting or punching or hanging off the front of a moving subway train; it revolves around asking questions, being smart, showing courage, demonstrating tenacity — it’s entertainment for grown-ups, not a power fantasy for overgrown adolescents.

Another thing to love about The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is that while it may not be the finest New York movie ever made, it is the finest Noo Yawk movie ever made, full of long shots and real locations and background noise; everyone in it is braying, bellowing, mad at something and venting their frustrations far and wide. Told that 18 fare-paying customers face death without the ransom being paid, one subway higher-up is blase; “Screw the goddamn passengers! What the hell did they expect for their lousy 35 cents — to live forever?” Discussing whether or not to pay the ransom with his wife, the Mayor hears her counsel: “I know a million dollars sounds like a lot of money. But just think what you’ll get in return. ” “What?” “Eighteen sure votes. …” The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is majestically cynical — grumbling and growling and surly — and yet that makes the characters all the more human, which makes the movie all the more enjoyable. I have had very few days where I could identify emotionally with Keanu Reeves or Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone or any of the big-screen action heroes of my youth. I have had a thousand days where I could identify with Walter Matthau in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

So, yes, at some point in 2009 I’ll go see The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. And I think there’s an excellent chance it’ll be good, or at least okay; Washington was great in The Inside Man, a modern Pelham-esque NYC crime tale; Tony Scott may not make high art, but he makes excellent trash; maybe they’ll hire David Holmes to do remixes of David Shire’s amazing original score. And it may not be good; hearing the phrase “John Travolta” has inspired less and less enthusiasm on my part for a while now; there may be an emphasis on brawn over brains; the acrid authentic ’70s Noo Yawkiness of the original may be replaced with the smoother artificial flavors of post-Giuliani New York. But a very large group of people in Hollywood, right now, are betting hundreds of millions of dollars that their re-make of Pelham will be entertaining and enthralling and well-received and profitable; watch the loose, loud, funny, fresh, exciting and unexpected original and you’ll get a pretty good idea of why they’re willing to make that bet.”

– Rocchi’s Retro Rental, SFgate.com, Oct. 29, 2007

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“You haul 16 tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go;
I owe my soul to the company store. …”

– “Sixteen Tons,” Merle Travis

Know thyself. — Solon of Athens

Moon, the directorial debut of Duncan Jones, opens with a bright, breezy bit of corporate propaganda explaining how, in the film’s near-future, clean energy is provided by fusion fueled by hydrogen wrenched from lunar mineral deposits on the dark side of the Moon. Sam Rockwell is Sam Bell, who runs a fuel-harvesting station, aided only by the base’s A.I., GERTY (given voice by Kevin Spacey). Sam is nearing the end of his three-year contract, and it’s been a lonely stint; he’s got only two weeks left, but he’s on the thin edge. The communications satellite is down, so Sam can’t talk to Earth — his bosses, his wife — directly; for all of the high-tech trappings and whiz-bang science of his work, Sam’s a hard rock miner. And that’s always been dangerous work.

Moon evokes many things — the nature of the human experience, the nature of employee-management relations, how the odds are fairly good that the future will be exactly like today, but more so. With all of its far-flung inventions, impeccable visual design and Clint Mansell’s eerie score, Moon boils down to a single man having a long conversation in isolation, telling himself a few lies and opening his own eyes to a few truths; Rockwell, playing the only person for tens of thousands of miles, has no one else to act against, and much of his plight has to be conveyed through special effects that gave him little or nothing to work with on-set.

Many reviews of Moon will go to great pains to preserve its twist — as will I — but let it also be said that Moon is more than just a film defined by its twist. Moon has a cat in the bag, yes, but it knows when to open the bag and bring out the cat, fairly early on, so we can take a good look at both and think about what they really mean. Jones (who, not coincidentally, is David Bowie’s son; Sam Bell and Major Tom could be distant relations) has made a science fiction film that’s not about aliens but instead about alienation, not about future technologies but instead about the people who’ll have to live and work and cope with them.

There are bits and pieces of other films and directors in Moon; the earnestness of ’70s science fiction films like Silent Running, the eerie isolation and visions of Solaris, the frosty futurism of 2001, the blunt brusqueness of David Mamet’s working-class blue-collar plays; the tones and techniques of some of David Cronenberg’s finest films. But it is also its own film; I appreciated not just the production design, but also the thinking that went into it. When we first see the mobile camera-and-keyboard terminal for GERTY that can follow Sam through the base, for example, there’s a post-it note just under the lens; at one point Rockwell dances dementedly to Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine.” It’s a future, but it’s not one that far off; Sam Bell may be harvesting the energy of tomorrow, but he’s also got a temp job, with that phrase readable in any number of ways.

Clint Mansell’s score pulses and thrums with eerie life, filling the stark visions of the movie with a welcome energy and tone that still never seems obtrusive or jarring. Jones pulls a couple of remarkably tricky shots off with style and flair, but they’re always in the story, never above it. Spacey’s a little too famously familiar to play GERTY — you know it’s him, and that’s a touch distracting — but even then, Jones and screenwriter Nathan Parker take what you might expect from Sam’s relationship with GERTY in several interesting directions. And, to say it again; Moon has a twist, but those twists shape and turn a graceful, smart interlacing tapestry made of tone and character and plot and ideas.

Rockwell, mixing invested emotional scenes with tricky effects-driven moments, also shines. Even in the most extreme and improbable circumstances, he has a warm, everyday quality to him; his everyday observations still have a loopy, unique energy. Rockwell is given several tough acting challenges here, and he makes them no big deal, and he’s as capable of making you laugh as he is of breaking your heart. Moon is looking for a distributor here at Sundance, but since the phrase “smart science fiction” seems to translate to “box-office poison” in this day and age, it’ll have to be hoped someone takes a bet on Rockwell and Spacey’s names selling enough tickets or inspiring enough rentals to earn their money back. I can’t quite say I think Moon is knock-me-down, you-gotta-see-this brilliant; at the same time, I can say I’m still thinking about it, and in an age when most big-budget science fiction films are made by people with no respect for science or fiction, it’s a welcome pleasure.

– From my Cinematical Review

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