It’s frightening that in the 21st century sex trafficking is becoming a bigger issue each year. The reason is simple — it’s extremely profitable. Young women are stolen and forced to pay off some imaginary debt that never ends. If they run or talk, they are brutalized. The problem is only worse in the chaos of war zones. But in the early part of the century, the sex trafficking scandal that rocked the U.N. and its contractors was beyond repulsive. Those tasked with protecting the citizens of Bosnia where participating in the rape of them.

Based on the true life scandal, this thriller follows Kathryn Bolkovac (Rachel Weisz, THE CONSTANT GARDENER), a Nebraska cop who signs on to be a peacekeeper in Bosnia for the big paycheck. When she gets there she discovers that many of her fellow peacekeepers are too there for the paycheck, but nothing else. Her efforts to bring some law and order to the country are noticed by higher up human rights activist Madeleine Rees (Vanessa Redgrave, ANONYMOUS). Bolkovac is put in charge of women’s issues and soon discovers sex clubs where the “waitresses” have been forced there against their will. At first she is appalled to find that U.N. officers are frequenting these clubs, but it only gets worse the deeper she goes.

Larysa Kondracki’s film uses the structure of the tried and true internal affairs cop thriller. This makes this difficult story both accessible and engaging, but it never breaks free from the structure. This becomes very apparent toward the end when plot structure and efforts to amp up the tension force credibility to the side. The true life message loses some of its authenticity in the process.

Ever since her Oscar win for CONSTANT GARDENER, Weisz seems very suited for theses kinds of roles. It’s the kind of role Jane Fonda use to play, but Weisz doesn’t dip into the sanctimonious outrage Fonda sometimes exuded. Weisz comes off more matter of fact — like it’s just the right thing to do.

The story is given an emotional side through the plight of Raya (Roxana Condurache), a young girl sold into slavery by someone close to her. Kathryn saves her from one awful situation to put her into another one. The path to get Raya back home is filled with political landmines. Bureaucrat Laura Levin (Monica Bellucci, IRREVERSIBLE) can’t help her get back home because she doesn’t have a passport and she doesn’t have a passport because her captors took it so she can’t get home. Raya is afraid to trust the system, which we come to find is a very valid feeling when it lets her down and puts her back in the clutches of her enslaver.

As Kathryn uncovers how deep the corruption goes, she becomes more and more isolated. It goes too high and would embarrass important people at the contractor, U.N. and the U.S. government. Madeleine teams her with internal affairs officer Peter Ward (David Strathairn, GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.), but how much he can protect her is in question too. Will she have time to save Raya before the powers that be crush her?

The most haunting part is that while Kathryn’s claims were validated by a British labor tribunal, nothing has happened. No one has been charged with crimes. DynCorp., the security firm that provided the peacekeepers, is still used by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. Makes you rethink a lot.

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What could a 3-D family film from Martin Scorsese be like? With HUGO now as an example, the answer is magical. And it’s a magic that Scorsese is best suited to bring to life — the magic of the movies. At one point, a young boy visits a movie studio and the director leans down to him and tells him if he’s ever wondered where his dreams come from this is where they are made.

Based on Brian Selznick’s celebrated illustrated novel THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET, the story follows its title character (Asa Butterfield, THE BOY WITH THE STRIPED PAJAMAS) as he survives as an orphan in the clockworks of a Paris train station. After his father (Jude Law, A.I.), a clock maker, died, he has been trying to finish a project they were working on together — fixing an automaton. This mechanical human is a complex one that seems to be designed to write something and Hugo believes it will give him a message from his dad. But the boy loses his notebook filled with calculations to Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley, GANDHI) after the toyshop owner catches him trying to steal. What Hugo doesn’t know is that Georges is Georges Melies, the once famed filmmaker who is best known for A TRIP TO THE MOON, where a rocket sticks into the eye of the man on the moon.

In order to get his book back, Hugo befriends Georges’ goddaughter Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz, KICK-ASS), who loves secrets and adventures. Their friendship soon grows around fixing the automaton, which they discover has connections to Isabelle’s heart shaped key, Papa Georges and his wife Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory, INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE). Hugo shares his philosophy that the world is one big machine and because no machine has extra parts, everyone must have a purpose. He is struggling to find his though. Isabelle suggests that he is meant to fix things.

Every moment is filled with the joy of filmmaking. Leave it to a master filmmaker like Scorsese to transform the novelty of 3-D into something more. We’ve seen dozens of versions of epic clockworks, but never with this kind of tension. The heights and whirling gears seem far more threatening. Take the Lumiere brothers’ pioneering 1897 film ARRIVAL OF A TRAIN AT LA CIOTAT. It was just a train arriving in the station approaching the camera, but when it was screened for the first time people were frightened as the locomotive came toward them. Using 21st century 3-D filmmaking techniques, Scorsese recreates this sensation for an audience with film in their DNA.

For the film buffs, Scorsese works in references to a great deal of Melies’ work, as well as another famous clock scene from Harold Lloyd’s SAFETY LAST to stick with the theme of time. When the automaton isn’t working, Hugo says that it is just waiting to do what it was meant to do and we can’t help but believe this also refers to Melies. Before cinema, he was a magician and he brought his talent for illusion to film as a profound innovator in special effects. After WWI, tastes changed and his films weren’t popular anymore. Desperate for money, he sold most of his films to a company that melted them down to make shoe heals. Preservationist Scorsese comes through loud and clear.

But this isn’t just a history lesson about film — it captures the joy of film from the creator to the spectator. The surreal version of Paris glows electric and has a touch of steam punk to it too. Films bring people together to share experiences. In this film, Hugo brings people together. He watches stories unfold in his station. Monsieur Frick (Richard Griffiths, WITHNAIL & I) can’t seem to get a moment with Madame Emilie (France de la Tour, HARRY POTTER) because of her snippy dog. The station inspector, played by Sacha Baron Cohen (BORAT) in full on Peter Sellers mode, is obsessed with catching thieves, but can the sweet flower girl Lisette (Emily Mortimer, MATCH POINT) make him smile? Can Hugo make Georges accept his past and do what he is meant to do?

Now that I’ve seen this film I couldn’t think of a better filmmaker to have made it. Scorsese has recreated past worlds in films like THE AGE OF INNOCENCE and GANGS OF NEW YORK, but not like he’s done with 1930s Paris. He’s done comedy before in AFTER HOURS, but not like the classic slapstick and word play as he does here. He’s dealt with real life figures in films like RAGING BULL and THE AVIATOR, but not like the loving tribute he pays to Melies, whose work is the reason we have a film like HUGO. This film leaves no doubt what Martin Scorsese was meant to do.

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Interwoven throughout Clint Eastwood’s biopic of J. Edgar Hoover is Hoover dictating his “Untitled FBI Story” to a series of young agents. One agent asks if the story of Hoover and the FBI can be separated. It’s hard to say because for better or worse Hoover was the FBI for most of its existence. He became the Bureau’s head in 1924 and stayed there through eight presidents. He asks another agent who the most famous man in the world is and the agent replies, “You, sir.”

Leonardo DiCaprio crafts a subtle portrait of a man who few truly knew because Hoover didn’t even know himself. In the film, Hoover is portrayed as a do-gooder whose biggest joy is to impress his mother Annie (Judi Dench, JANE EYRE). It is believed that Hoover was a secret drag queen, but the film doesn’t delve into salacious details. It presents the facts fairly straight forward. He was a life long bachelor who lived with his mother until she died. And once the tall, handsome Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer, THE SOCIAL NETWORK) joined the Bureau, they were inseparable. Hoover seems to have a classic case of transference where he moralizes to the public and struggles with secrets behind closed doors.

Personality wise Hoover comes off chiefly paranoid. His desire to monitor every radical in the country is his first motivation, spurred by his fears of the Bolshevik revolution in his early days with the Justice Department. But that paranoia spilled over into rivals and he began to monitor anyone he deemed a threat to him and his beloved FBI. Outside of Tolson and his mother, the only other person he truly trusted was his longtime secretary Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts, KING KONG), who was the keeper and protector of his secret files. While he keep his sex life very private, he had a knack for recording the sex lives of presidents and their wives and using it to keep him firmly in place.

Eastwood, working from MILK writer Dustin Lance Black’s script, seems critical of Hoover, but not unfair. In a poignant voice over moment, Hoover talks about not repeating the mistakes of our past. While he might be talking about radicals, what we’re thinking is all the wiretapping on Americans he has done without warrants. But still, the film pays credit where credit is due and highlights Hoover’s progressive dedication to forensic science, which modernized detective work. The detail of the expert work done in the Lindberg baby kidnapping is like early CSI.

Hoover was a man obsessed with the way things looked, especially himself. He was meticulous about the appearance of his G-men. He asks one agent with a “flashy” suit whether he believes he is working in a saloon. When his skills as a detective are called into question by Congress, he goes out into the field more… or at least to the photo ops more. The image of honest, respected government detectives was something he consciously crafted to the point where the line between fabrication and the truth became blurred. It reminded me of Eastwood’s UNFORGIVEN where the character says if you have the truth and the legend, print the legend.

Some have complained that the film doesn’t go after Hoover enough, needing the savage approach of someone like Oliver Stone. But despite its flaws (the music is too sentimental at times and the ending has too many endings like Eastwood’s CHANGLING), the film is like Stone’s NIXON in many ways. Both films are about two powerful paranoid men who tried to do good, but were brought down by their own foibles. The real tragedy of Hoover’s life is that all he wanted was to be respected, but his pettiness and hypocrisy made him a public shame in many people’s eyes. There was a bit of a radical lurking in his own heart and that was who he was really trying to imprison.

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Bill Cunningham is a man of integrity. Despite being a legendary photographer in the fashion world, he lives in a tiny, rent-controlled apartment in Carnegie Hall. His room is filled with file cabinets with decades of negatives and a bed. The bathroom is in the hall. For much of his work, he refused to take money, because he didn’t want anyone to own him or his work. He won’t even take a free glass of water at the events he covers. His work is his life and he won’t compromise that.

During the film, Cunningham celebrates his 80th birthday. He has been taking pictures of New Yorkers and what they wear for decades. The film features a who’s whos list of editors from the top fashion magazines who follow is work because he has a keen eye for catching trends that are growing out of the streets. In covering fashion shows, he has a keen eye for when a designer is copying something done before and has no qualms pointing it out. He loves fashion, which he describes as our armor to go out into the world.

Ironically, he does not dress to impress. Though he is an icon in haute couture circles, he owns few clothes. His signature item is a cheap blue smock that the trash men in Paris wear. It has enough pockets for his film and is cheap enough that he doesn’t feel bad when his camera wears out the front. When he first moved into Carnegie Hall’s artists’ apartments, he was a fledgling hat designer. He now seems embarrassed by his work. Maybe he was too practical or introverted to be the one on the other side of the camera.

When the fashion luminaries are asked about his personal life, they know little. One believes he must have come from money because no one else would live like he does. But in actuality he came from a modest background. He was lucky enough to create a job out of the thing he loves most in the world and has cleared all other distractions from his life. His family didn’t like him going into fashion, because it wasn’t manly enough. When asked if he’s ever had a romantic relationship, he replies, “Are you asking if I’m gay?’ It’s what his family feared. He’s elusive about answering, but he does admit that he hasn’t ever had a relationship, because he is married to his art.

His uncompromised stance on his art has allowed him to retain a great deal of control over the years. His spreads have his influence over every aspect. As seen in one sequence, it must be a frustrating job working as a layout artist with this perfectionist. Conversely, for Cunningham, it’s frustrating to create art about fashion when he’s working with a layout artist who he calls a lumberjack. He spends almost every day pedaling around New York City looking for uniquely dressed people. He is fearless in his pursuit, even stopping in traffic to get a shot. One thing he is not interested in is celebrity. He doesn’t care who the person is, only whether they are wearing something interesting. Once for Women’s Wear Daily he did a spread that compared average people wearing high fashion on the street to models that wore the same outfit on the runway. He was devastated when the editors changed his copy to make fun of the average people. That ended his long working relationship with the magazine.

He is a joyous man. You don’t have to like fashion or photography or New York culture to be inspired by Cunningham. To find something you love so much that you dedicate every day to it into your 80s is marvelous. Even when life throws him curve balls like getting evicted from his home because Carnegie Hall wants to put in more office space filled with telemarketers, he brushes it off easily. He is too happy and content to worry about that sort of thing. There is another picture waiting for him to take to worry about.

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Before this film I had never heard of Joyce McKinney and her bizarre headline grabbing life. It’s a fitting statement of her bizarre story, one that grabs attention and fizzles out as the next sensational tale takes hold of the headlines of magazines and newspapers at the check-out line. It’s got it all — a former beauty queen, a Mormon missionary, violence and kinky sex.

Joyce McKinney was in search of that special guy her whole life. After living in L.A. for a stretch, she moved to Utah where she meets Kirk Anderson. For Joyce it was love at first sight. The problem for Kirk was that he was a Mormon and was expected to marry a nice Mormon girl. Not a former Miss Wyoming. Kirk up and left on his required mission without telling Joyce where he was going. She hired a private investigator to hunt him down, believing he had been kidnapped and brainwashed by a cult.

She located Kirk in England. Along with her devoted friend KJ May, she hired a pilot and a bodyguard to accompany them to the U.K. on a mission to free Kirk. With spy gear and a gun in their possession, they quickly lost their paid help and had to do it alone. What happened next is up for interpretation.

Joyce’s story is that she took Kirk to a cottage in the countryside where she made him all the foods that he loved and attempted to de-brainwash him. She gave him cinnamon oil massages. They had sex. When Kirk went impotent, Joyce consulted a Christian sexual manual that said she should tie him up so that he could relax and let go of his sexual hang ups. According to Joyce, they willingly went into town together where Kirk saw a headline that he was missing and decided to call his church to tell them he was okay. Joyce never saw him again.

Kirk claims that he was held a gunpoint and taken to the cottage against his will. There he was sexual assaulted. Joyce believes his story is just Mormon brainwashing again. Like she says, how can a woman rape a man? That’s like trying to shove a marshmallow into a parking meter. As a result she and KJ were arrested. The tabloids ran with the story, making her an instant celebrity attending movie openings in London. But when the attention got too hot and jail time loomed, she and KJ posed a deaf mutes, jumped bail and flew to Canada.

The British tabloids battled it out with conflicting takes on the story. Peter Tory, a reporter for The Daily Express, landed an interview with Joyce, telling her side of the story. She paints herself as the enduring romantic who will love Kirk until the end of time. She sees herself as the good girl who gave up her virginity to save the man she loved from a cult. Meanwhile, The Daily Mirror paints a different story. They dig up over a thousand modeling photos of Joyce, many nude and S&M style. Mirror photographer Kent Gavin found ads for her advertising as a call girl. But things are never cut and dry. Her former friend Steve Moskowitz said that she might have given oral, but no one had sex with her. I guess in Joyce’s mind that still made her the nice girl next door.

Then when the story seems over it takes another bizarre turn. Joyce once again finds herself in the tabloid headlines. But this time it’s Bernann McKinney, not that Joyce Bernann McKinney from the Mormon sex in chains scandal.

This film is very akin to Morris’ hilarious docs GATES OF HEAVEN and VERNON, FLORIDA with the biopic flavor of his MR. DEATH, another doc about a delusional person, thrown in as well. He has fun with the sensational story by superimposing some of the more salacious statements by his interviewees up on the screen. Moreover, he uses cutout style animation to liven Joyce’s tales up as well.

Tory describes Joyce in the film as barking mad. Director Errol Morris simply allows Joyce to back that claim up. She is a flamboyant and passionate personality. She has painted an image of herself in her head and no fact to the contrary will change that. When Kirk comes back to the States, she follows him. Some (like the police) call it stalking. She sees it as her undying devotion. She claims that Mormonism warped Kirk’s sex drive, but it seems that her own religious upbringing has warped her and she is simply projecting that onto Kirk. At one point in reference to Kirk, she says, “If you tell a lie long enough, you learn to believe it.”

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I became a fan of comedian Bill Hicks when I caught one of his old HBO specials on late at night. I wondered why I hadn’t heard of this angry hilarious and provocative performer before, so I went to the Internet and looked him up. Turns out he has a highly influential comedian of the early ‘90s who on the cusp of breaking into the big time in the U.S. died at the age of 32. Now British filmmakers Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas have brought his story to film in this innovative documentary that combines archive footage and animation to bring Hicks’ story to life.

Bill Hicks started his career as a comedian while in high school. He and his friend Dwight Slade snuck out of their houses to audition for the new comedy club in Houston, Texas. By the time he moved to L.A. after graduating, he was already a veteran. At 19, he was playing the famed Comedy Store and was getting meetings with agents to pitch comedy scripts. But for the eager artist success wasn’t coming fast enough and the City of Angels wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be, so he returned to Houston, where he made a name for himself not only as a comedian, but as a man living on the edge.

Upon returning to Houston, he took hallucinogenic mushrooms for the first time. This from a young man who had never drank before. He was determined to throw himself into life in order to push his comedy. His increasing use of drugs and alcohol made him bolder than ever, but it also made him erratic and he lost bookings. He might still be brilliant, but it wasn’t worth it. Eventually he realized that while drugs might have made him who he was they were also destroying him in the process. So in order to get away from bad influences, he moved to New York and got sober.

Hicks was never afraid to say the unpopular thing. He openly talked about his drug use and the positives he felt it brought to his life. He would joke about every news story on drugs being negative. The news reports that a man on LSD dies after jumping off a building thinking he can fly. Hicks would say, “Why blame the LSD when the guy’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he start on the ground and take off from there to see how it would go first?”

Hicks’ early influence was Woody Allen, but one can see shades of Richard Pryor and George Carlin in his work. More recent similarities would be to call him Bill Mahr crossed with Denis Leary. In fact there are several YouTube videos that show off the striking similarities between Hicks and Leary. Some might say Leary “borrowed” heavily from Hicks, but the film doesn’t address the issue at all.

While Hicks struggled to get a foothold in the States, he flourished in the U.K. In England, he’d play to sold out arenas and then come back to the U.S. to play hole in the wall comedy clubs in the middle of nowhere. It’s interesting to note that the British audiences loved his edgy political humor, but when he came back to the States he had to go back to dick jokes to get a laugh. No wonder he was so disillusioned with his home country.

The film is presented in a photo animation technique similar to the wonderful doc THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE. Intercut with Hicks’ live performances, the style makes the film lively and engaging. By the end the repetitiveness of some stills and lack of early talking heads to orient the audience weigh on the viewer. That said, the approach sets this doc apart because we actually get to see Hicks breaking out of his bedroom window to start his destiny.

This is a film for the Hicks fan and for the novice. It’s a loving and often moving tribute to a lesser known comic genius. His story is retold by his family and friends who share their point of view of why he did what he did. It gives a personal touch to the story of a talented addict who was smart enough to know when enough was enough.

Smart was the cornerstone of everything he did. Bravery was the other. You might not like everything that he has to say and he never cared that you did. He was going to say it anyway. For him no other profession in the world paid someone to speak their mind so freely. So the only honest thing to do was to just say what he thought and not what we were told to think. No matter how ugly or unpopular it was. On occasion a rude and/or ignorant crowd member would hear directly what he thought of them. Once he was told by one attendee that as a Christian he didn’t like what Hicks had said. Hicks told him to forgive him.

My only question for a film about Bill Hicks is how do you market a film about a guy who advised all people in marketing to kill themselves?

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Director Sam Taylor-Wood isn’t afraid to tackle an iconic tale for her first feature film. Working from Matt Greenhalgh’s adaptation of Julia Baird’s memoir, the film tells the originals of The Beatles. For many fans it would sacrilegious to mess up this story. Taylor-Wood takes a classical straight-forward biopic approach, which benefits from a great cast, which includes a standout performance from KICK-ASS’ Aaron Johnson as John Lennon.

Baird was John’s sister, so the story is told from his point of view. As a young boy he went to live with his aunt and uncle. Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas, THE ENGLISH PATIENT) was the straight-upper-lipped task master, while his uncle George (David Threlfall, HOT FUZZ) was a jokester and a drinker. When his beloved uncle died, John was heartbroken and sought out his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff, THE MAGDALENE SISTERS), who had remarried and had two daughters.

His mother is a carefree spirit, who loves rock ‘n roll. The more he spends time with her the more rebellious he gets. Mimi tries to keep him disciplined with school, but Julia has taught him the banjo, which was just the start of his obsession with music. With his friends, he forms The Quarrymen. At a concert, Paul McCartney (Thomas Brodie-Sangster, LOVE ACTUALLY) introduces himself. John and his friends were quick to dismiss the straight-laced looking 15-year-old, until they heard him play. Later Paul would bring in George Harrison (Sam Bell). And the rest was history as they say.

The film starts out quite pedestrian as it develops the dynamics between John, Mimi and Julia. If this is the last generic bonding scene at a carnival I ever see, I’d be thankful. But once the story settles into John’s move into music, the film takes off. The introduction of Paul helps a great deal, because it highlights many of the subtle things the story was establishing earlier without realizing what they were doing. The film argues that John got inside rock ‘n roll for the image, while Paul came to it for the music.

In its mother-son love triangle, the film takes on its most unique quality. John resents Mimi’s stiff views and finds comfort in his mother’s spirit. Mimi represents everything he’s trying to rebel against. But he’ll find that his real mother isn’t perfect. The relationship between them all is complex and changes over time. By the end, we see how both women shaped who he became.

Johnson, who is best known as teen superhero (punching bag) Kick-Ass, is remarkable as Lennon. It’s difficult to play such a well known person without making a caricature of them. Johnson gets all of Lennon’s mannerisms and weaves them into a natural performance.

At first I wondered whether I would like this film if I didn’t know who this nowhere boy ended up becoming and doubted it. But by the end I didn’t care that it was about John Lennon. This biopic works as a character study about a young man coming into his own and coming to terms with where he came from. The story builds simply to more complex and emotionally powerful scenes. Rock ‘n roll allowed John from becoming a nowhere man… even if his Aunt Mimi feared it would.

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Albert was not born with a stammer, but developed one around four or five. He was born a prince. The former creates a great problem for the latter when public speaking is key to the job he was born to do. Making matters worse, he was prince during the boom of wireless radio and disturbing times with an older brother that had little interest in being king. He would become King George VI.

Colin Firth plays Albert, or Bertie as his family knew him. Inside Bertie was very capable of being a great king, but the stutter made him sound like a fool. His father King George V (Michael Gambon, HARRY POTTER) lorded over him with an iron fist and had no time for his “problems.” His brother Edward (Guy Pearce, MEMENTO) was a globetrotting party boy right up until the moment his father died. He was not capable of being a great king. He wanted what he wanted and gave up the crown to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson (Eve Best, TV’s NURSE BETTY). Now Bertie wasn’t just a stammering prince, but a stammering king, the only king to ever take the throne with the previous king still alive and well. This kind of pressure didn’t help his stutter.

Before he was thrust into the limelight, he tried every speech therapist in England. Then his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter, SWEENEY TODD) found the unorthodox counselor Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush, SHINE), who has steadfast rules even for princes. Clients must come to the office and in the room they are equals. At first, Bertie defiantly insisted that he was there only to treat the stammer and not interested in getting to the psychological underpinnings of the problem. He talked to no one about his feelings, not even his wife. It seems he was still the bullied little boy only trapped in an adult body.

Director Tom Hopper (THE DAMNED UNITED), working from a script by David Seidler (QUEST FOR CAMELOT), mounts a crowd-pleasing drama that is infused with the right dose of humor. Take notice to the scene where Lionel’s wife finally finds out whom his secret client is. The opening sequence where the prince must speak on the radio to a stadium of people is torturous. His stutter echoing across the arena only making it more pronounced. He is angry about the problem and the weight that is on his shoulders. Lionel allows him to express that angry in sessions. He doesn’t stutter when he’s cursing like a merchant marine. Eventually Bertie opens up and reveals abuses that would be shocking in any home let alone the royal family.

Firth is magnificent as a man who must fight embarrassment every time he opens his mouth. He makes Bertie a complex man who is internally battling with himself at all times. One moment he has great strength and the next he’s afraid of his own shadow as Lionel says. It almost seems cliché already to say that he needs to find his voice. Rush’s Lionel helps him do that. Logue is the exact opposite of Bertie. He came from nothing, a transplant from Australia, but he is profoundly confident, but also keenly kind. Rush makes him a man completely comfortable in his own skin… even when he’s giving less than stellar stage performances of Richard III.

The film does a very good job of placing us in the shoes of King George VI. The world is being overrun by the likes of Hitler and Stalin. His brother is flying all over the world without a care about England’s future under his rule. His father then thrusts all the responsibility on him. How are you supposed to lead a nation out of a dark time, if you can’t even get a word out?

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This true-life survival story makes you wonder how you would handle the same situation. If you were trapped in a remote canyon could you cut off your own arm with a dull blade? Danny Boyle’s film puts the viewer in that situation with all its physical and mental challenges. This is the rare thriller with an existential thread.

James Franco plays Aron Ralston, an experienced hiker, who took off by himself to hike Blue John Canyon in Utah. Even though he was a member of the search and rescue team, he told no one where he was going. While climbing down he canyon, a boulder broke loose and crushed his right forearm, pinning him between the rock and canyon wall. Chipping away at or trying to move the rock quickly proved futile. The title tells us how long he was stuck there with little food and water. His multi-tool was dull and could barely scratch his skin, so when he got desperate enough he broke the bones in his arm and used the pliers to snap the stronger tendons.

Director Danny Boyle (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) puts the viewer into that experience. You might have read the reports of people fainting during screenings. While the film gets bloody, Boyle is not gratuitous about the gore. He makes us cringe, but the sound of breaking bones is more twitch inducing than the bloody images that anyone could see on a TV surgery show. To completely avoid the gruesome details of the story would have cheated Ralston’s accomplishment. His will for survival is inspiring. Remember he did what he did while delirious and then needed to rappel down a 65-foot sheer wall and walk miles back to his stick shift truck.

These are the sensational facts of his ordeal, but its some of the other details that really got me thinking about how I’d fare in the same situation. How do you handle being pinned where you are virtually dangling from your smashed arm? How would you sleep? How do you retrieve a tool you’ve dropped? How do you prepare for cutting off your arm and not bleed to death? Ralston’s climbing and survival skills ultimately saved his life. Boyle and Simon Beaufoy’s script does an excellent job of building one set back on another, showing how Ralston had to keep learning.

Besides transporting us into the physical experience of Ralston, Boyle puts us into his mental state. Using confessions to a camcorder, we get inside Ralston’s slipping Mind frame. On his way to Blue John, he met two pretty hikers Kristi (Kate Mara, SHOOTER) and Megan (Amber Tamblyn, THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS). He took them on a side adventure and they invite him to a party that night. They wonder if he’ll show up. He wonders what if he just went with them instead. The more desperate the situation gets he begins thinking about his loved ones. He remembers ex-girlfriend Rana (Clemence Poesy, HARRY POTTER), which becomes a poignant contemplation of “the one that got away.” Close to the end of his ordeal he starts having visions of a boy on a sofa (Peter Joshua Hull); not until the end credits do we know exactly who the boy is. The ambiguity works one way when we first see it and then gains a new power once we know exactly what we were seeing.

Franco is asked to carry the film pretty much on his own and he handles the load without breaking a sweat. It’s hard to imagine him not earning his first Oscar nomination. He captures the physical and mental extremes naturally, but it’s the subtler emotions that are the most impressive. The harsh regret he feels for being what he calls the hard hero and not telling people where he was going is powerful. The sequence where he jokingly conducts a mock talk show to the camcorder adds a needed touch of humor, ending with a note of sobering poignancy.

Boyle uses stylistic flashes to good extent. Split screens at the beginning define the fast paced and ease of the modern world. Ralston shuffling around in a cabinet looking for something works as a nice foreshadow. The pacing of Ralston starting his expedition has a reckless feel with its quick cuts and hard music. Watch how Boyle works in close-ups of Ralston’s hand running across the canyon walls. The timing of the title reveal is one of the best ever.

The film reminded me of the harrowing doc TOUCHING THE VOID, which featured nerve-wrenching recreations of climbers trapped on a frozen mountain. That film was more haunting while this one is more ponderous. Maybe too ponderous at times. That said the film does ponder about how life is too short and that being a hard hero on a solo mission leaves us stuck in a canyon all alone.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook business card read, “I’m the CEO, bitch.” It sums up nicely the impression that one gets about the youngest billionaire on the planet from this film. David Fincher’s drama, his best and most sophisticated film to date, presents in detail the creation of the social networking site and the legal issues that surrounded it. Zuckerberg had to simultaneously fight two lawsuits against him. As the film’s tag line so aptly states — you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.

In the film’s opening conversation, Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg, ZOMBIELAND) comes off as both arrogant and insecure to his girlfriend Erica Albright (Rooney Mara, A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET). He’s obsessed with making a name for himself at Harvard and after she breaks up with him that night, he goes home and does just that. He blogs terrible things about her and then hacks into the school network, steals the images of the female students and creates a website that randomly selects two pictures and allows the viewer to rank the hotness of each one. He did this while drunk.

The stunt draws the attention of school officials who put him of academic suspension. Zuckerberg wanted them to thank him for pointing out the vulnerabilities in their system. The site received over 20,000 in a few hours and brought down the Harvard network. This drew attention from elite Harvard club members Cameron (Armie Hammer, TV’s GOSSIP GIRLS) and Tyler Winklevoss (Josh Pence) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella, SYRIANA), who went to Zuckerberg with an idea for a social network site exclusively for Harvard students. Zuckerberg agreed to develop it for them and then went straight to his best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield, NEVER LET ME GO) and asked him to invest in an idea he had, called The Facebook.

Irony abounds in this film, as the man who decided to bring the social environment of college online was a man without any apparent social skills of his own. Always laced with a tinge of jealousy, Zuckerberg has a snide comment every time Saverin has an update on his pledging the Phoenix Club. Zuckerberg wasn’t asked to join any clubs after the girl-rating site made him a pariah to the female population on campus. Every person he meets he seems to be evaluating and assessing how much better he is than them.

As The Facebook spread to more college campuses, Saverin wanted to monetize the site with ads, but Zuckerberg was strongly against it, because ads would make the site less cool. Then came Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake, ALPHA DOG), the creator of Napster. He was a kind of idol to Zuckerberg. As a fellow brilliant young entrepreneur, he made millions and thumbed his nose at the establishment. He showed Zuckerberg the flash life of big money and he had connections to venture capital. Saverin was reluctant to have Parker muscle his way in with his tainted image as a notorious partier.

The film is a multi-layered one. Fincher, working from Aaron Sorkin’s wonderful screenplay based on Ben Mezrich’s book, THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES, crafts a tale that represents Generation Y as a whole. Youth oriented society pushing forward at lightning speed with technology the older generation can barely turn on. Facebook represents a world where privacy is a thing of the past and what you write or other people write about you online can define who you more than who you really are. There is a great scene where Saverin’s girlfriend confronts him about his relationship status and she can’t buy the excuse that the CFO of Facebook doesn’t know how to update it.

For Zuckerberg, his life represents the anonymity the Internet gives you. You can and do anything you want to anyone else with impunity. He was resentful of people like the Winklevosses, who came from money and rowed crew for Harvard. The success of Facebook was a direct stab at their world. He was smarter than them all and knew it and wouldn’t let them forget it. And in the end what did it get him? Billions of dollars and his only friend suing him.

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