LITTLE ROCK — Battle Royale (Unrated, 114 minutes) — Just in time for The Hunger Games, the Japanese cult film based on the 1999 best-seller by Koushun Takami — about a group of ninth-graders forced to fight to the death under order of the government — finally gets a DVD release in this country. It’s a disturbing, energetic film that could never have been made in Hollywood, and one that’s rightly considered a modern classic by some. That said, it’s not to everyone’s taste, including this reviewer’s. Grade: 87
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (R, 158 minutes) — It’s very tempting to call David Fincher’s remix of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a superfluous venture, to put it down as another cynical Hollywood maneuver designed to take advantage of the American public’s distaste for subtitles. That I can’t quite do that is a testament to Fincher’s nervy intelligence and the quite unexpected, excellent ferocity of Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander version 2.0. While I still have qualms about the necessity of the movie, it’s hard to deny the punch of Fincher’s version. He has tweaked the story just a bit, introducing a bittersweet dollop of romance while keeping the tough and brutal noir procedural at the heart of the matter. And the tenderizing may do more than make the movie more palatable to multiplex audiences — it might actually better set up the inevitable second and third installments. (The Swedish film trilogy got weaker with each installment; Fincher’s movie ends on an unresolved and nearly heartbreaking note that complicates the ongoing relationship between the two main characters.)
None of that matters, I suspect, if you are in the movie’s target demographic of people who haven’t seen the Swedish films or read any of the Stieg Larsson best-sellers that feature Lisbeth and Mikael Blomkvist. And if you’ve been waiting for the English language version before checking out the international phenomenon, then by all means see this movie. It’s gripping, suspenseful entertainment with lots of sex, violence and visual panache. Grade: 87
Carnage (R, 79 minutes) — Refreshingly brief and depressingly reductive, Carnage is Roman Polanski’s filmed version of Yasmina Reza’s obvious, heavy-handed Tony Award-winning play God of Carnage. It’s a rote, antiseptic exercise performed by earnest professionals who clearly relish the mouth-feel of their lines.
And given the quality of the players (Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly), it’s not all bad — just petty and ungenerous, a sort of sub-Edward Albee take on the animalistic nature that lies just beneath our socialized surfaces. You can enjoy it for the flashing of the actors’ eyes and the way they snap off their lines, but the arc of the production — the slipping off of decorous masks, of moving from civility to ferality over the course of a few minutes — is pretty pat. In all, it feels a little bit like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for dummies. Grade: 83
The Muppets (PG, 109 minutes) — Jason Segal gets the band back together to save their old theater. Director James Bobin maintains the TV series’ charming air of anarchy, and all the bigface guest stars seem pleased to be able to run lines with Kermie and company. Grade: 86
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MovieStyle, Pages 35 on 03/23/2012