Wow, Away frm Her has gotten four 100s and leaped up to 87, which I think makes it the best-reviewed movie of 2007 on Metacritic.

GREAT for Waitress. I wouldn't be surprised if it actually went up with the actuals. It seems like the perfect Mothers Day film, if you're near a theater showing it. If it gets another good expansion the next couple weeks, it should make it into the Top 10, and has a shot at being yet another summer indie comedy breakout for Searchlight (Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine), which would help the odds for Russell at the Oscar tremendously.

Away from Her isn't gonna be a big breakout, but it just needs to make a few million to get Christie into the race. Box Office doesn't play that big of a role in Actress (Catalina Sandino Moreno was nommed for Maria Full of Grace even though it made less than $6 million in the summer), and Lionsgate would love to get into the race again after Crash.

Away from Her is up to 88 on Metacritic, with an additional score of 100. 95% at Rotten Tomatoes and it remains at 100% Cream of the Crop!!!!

It expanded to almost 200 theaters yesterday. I'm telling you guys, Julie Christie is the first sure thing this year. Jump on the bandwagon already

No need to convince me. I'm sold!

Also, sounds like the Coen brothers new movie is getting some great reviews and being called one of their best. Javier Bardem is also getting great reviews. I think the name is No Country For Old Men? Something like that.

The reviews I read about it in Empire and Total Film were just average...

Bottom Line: Angelina Jolie shines in a suspenseful docudrama about a terrorist kidnapping.

But this is ultimately -- and very intimately -- Mariane Pearl's story, and much of it rests on Jolie, who fits comfortably into the naturalistic mold that shapes the entire ensemble. Though Jolie sports a big belly, a high-coiffed hairstyle and a very challenging accent (raised in France, Mariane is of Afro-Cuban and Dutch descent), this isn't the sort of commanding star turn in which the performer vanishes behind a well-known celebrity mask, but rather a subdued, carefully considered portrait of a woman caught between premature grief and persistent hope.

Jolie plays Mariane as sharp and prickly, but also highly principled and completely devoted to her husband. Wisely, Winterbottom opts to shoot her more high-pitched outbursts from a distance or in near-darkness, as if refusing to milk more histrionics than necessary.

"May 21, 2007
"A Mighty Heart"
Given her tabloid noteriety, is it possible for Angelina Jolie to even register a performance anymore? That is, when on screen, can she make you believe that you are not looking at Angelina Jolie? That's just one of the questions going through my mind before seeing A Mighty Heart, the much-bruited film adaptation of Mariane Pearl's memoir starring Jolie as Pearl, co-produced by Jolie's companion Brad Pitt, and directed by Michael Winterbottom. (Pearl was the wife of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in early 2002. Mariane, also a journalist, was five months pregnant with their son at the time.)

The answer to the question is "kind of." Which is not to say that Jolie does not perform to the fullest of her capabilities, or that she is ineffective. But what makes her convincing here has as much to do with how she is shot as what she does.

The ever astute Winterbottom has cast the film as a procedural and an ensemble piece. Contrary to what many might have inferred from the production stills, official-and-non, that emerged during the making of the film, this is not a picture wherein a lone Mariane Pearl wanders wide-eyed through the streets of Karachi in a heroic search for her missing spouse. Mariane spends most of the time in the rented house of a friend and colleague (Archie Panjabi), surrounded by a partially ad hoc team—a Pakistani police captain, an American diplomat, a couple of Wall Street Journal staffers, etc.—trying to piece together the hows and whys of Pearl's abduction. (Pearl himself is played very well by Dan Futterman in his likable straight-shooter mode.)

Winterbottom appears to understand that no matter how much she is made up (here she is given a darker complexion and ringletted hair to better resemble the Afro-Cuban/Dutch Pearl; she looks pretty much just like herself regardless), there is no way an audience is going to look at her onscreen and NOT see Angelina Jolie. He employs a couple of strategies to tackle this. In the initial sequences of the film, he rarely puts her in the frame all by herself; she's always in part of some bustle, even if she's in the foreground. He also cuts very quickly; he doesn't give her any "moments." Thus, he makes her just a part of what he's weaving, much of which involves getting the viewer as deep as film possibly can get one into the feel of Karachi. Winterbottom's particularly good with environments, and he's also a deft, quick storyteller, and he juggles chronology in a way that gives us a quick, empathy-generating read of Daniel and Mariane's passionate involvement while moving the kidnap tale at almost full throttle.

Later, at moments when Mariane is most emotionally fraught, Winterbottom makes us not see Jolie by sort of not showing her to the viewer; he will shoot her from behind, or in silhouette. We don't get a full-on, well lit face-forward shot of Mariane screaming until she's giving birth to her and Daniel's son Adam. And by this point of the film, it works.

As does, I should say, the rest of the picture, which is involving and moving in the mode of another war-zone Winterbottom picture, Welcome to Sarajevo. Jolie and Pitt were very smart to get a director who doesn't do star turns to do Jolie's star turn. I dare say she's got at least an Oscar nomination locked.

I know what film will win both Best Picture and Best Director for this year!

So, A Mighty Heart is getting very good reviews and Angelina Jolie is being praised in most of them. Interesting...

If the movie is emotionally flat, it has nothing to do with Angelina Jolie's performance. Her Mariane is a compelling and complex individual. For eight days, she retains her equanimity - tightly coiled but holding it together. One man comments that he can't imagine someone so restrained is in the midst of such a crisis. There are little moments when Jolie lets us peer through the carefully guarded exterior, such as when Mariane is alone in bed. When incontrovertible news arrives about Daniel's fate, Mariane loses it. This is the clip that will be used to push Jolie's claim to an Oscar nomination. It's raw and powerful and feels like the genuine reaction of a pent-up volcano exploding through a cap.