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This Weeks Movie Reviews:
Dreamgirls Directed by Bill Condon. Written by Condon (screenplay) and Tom Eyen (book). Cinematography, Tobias A. Schliessler. Starring Jamie Foxx, Beyoncé Knowles, Eddie Murphy, Danny Glover and Jennifer Hudson. Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks SKG, 2007. PG-13. 131 minutes. 
Broadway musicals adapted by Hollywood tend to be very good (Grease, Chicago) or very bad (A Chorus Line, The Phantom of the Opera). When you consider the built-in audience of a Broadway hit, which might run for more than a decade, extreme opinions of an adaptation aren’t surprising. And given the nature of Broadway productions — the complex staging, lighting and choreography involved — a failure is apt to be a big failure, while a success gets proclaimed an instant classic. Read more…
The Painted Veil Directed by John Curran. Written by Ron Nyswaner, based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Music by Alexandre Desplat. Starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, Toby Jones, Diana Rigg and Liev Schreiber. Warner Independent Pictures, 2006. 125 minutes. PG-13.
Rich, beautiful and subtly wrenching, the latest adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1925 novel The Painted Veil is both a polished period piece and a lyrical, unlikely romance. As you watch the relationship between Kitty and Walter Fane, an unhappily married couple played to precision by a sulky Naomi Watts and a stiff-lipped Edward Norton, you may feel a bit torn between the classic sense the film creates visually and the sassy modernity that Watts offers at times. Adding to this rift is Alexandre Desplat’s Golden Globe-winning score, which stretches across the space between the English couple and the Chinese setting. But both of these rifts are purposeful, adding depth to the divide between Kitty and Walter. Read more…
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple: Directed by Stanley Nelson. Written by Marcia Smith. Music by Tom Phillips. Seventh Art Releasing, 2006. 86 minutes. Not rated. 
Director Stanley Nelson’s elegantly told film about the rise and terrible fall of Jim Jones and his Jonestown settlement is an affecting, engrossing document, horrifying and fascinating to watch. Beginning with Jones’ childhood and pacing swiftly through the years, Jonestown slows in the ’70s, when Jones established himself in California before fleeing to Guyana on the eve of a revealing article’s publication in New West magazine. Told in large part through interviews with former Peoples Temple members, Jonestown survivors and carefully used archival footage, the film offers a portrait of the contradictory persona of Jim Jones: cruel, charming, manipulative, racially progressive, unpredictable, welcoming, hypocritical. But it fails to satisfyingly explore or explain how Jones’ charisma was enough to convince more than 900 people to follow him to the middle of nowhere and then, on a dark day in November 1978, to death. Read more…