Page and
Olivia Thirlby
eat for three.
Womb With a View
Knocked-up teen finds love in soulful comedy
The Diving Bell and
the Butterfly

MATHIEU AMALRIC, EMMANUELLE SEIGNER MIRAMAX, PG- 13 Basquiat ’s Julian Schnabel scores with new artful biopic

In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French magazine editor revving with charm and chic, suffered a stroke, fell into a coma, and woke to a terror called “locked-in syndrome”—a paralysis that left him exiled in his own body, able only to control one eye. His therapists concocted a communication system for him, and dictating in that alphabet of winks, he wrote the memoir that Julian Schnabel (Basquiat) has fashioned into a singularly spectral look at love and fear. Even when we’re absorbing the trauma from Bauby’s perspective, the movie is anything but static. Its flow of memory and imagination transforms the hero’s nightmare into a dream, where a glance at the radiance of sunlight in a curtain is an elemental vision of what it means to be alive.

Youth isn’t
wasted on Roth.

subsist on potatoes and faith. Hell-bent on striking it rich, Plainview tests his greed against the self-righteousness of the local leader, a young preacher named, with the film’s typical subtlety, Eli Sunday. Though Day-Lewis seethes juicily, under the weight of all that allegory, Plainview steadily grows more vicious and less fascinating, wasting away to just a cackle and an empty leer.

Juno ELLEN PAGE, MICHAEL CERA FOX SEARCHLIGH T, PG- 13

The opening credits sequence catches 16 -year-old Juno MacGuff (Page) slouching through her crummy suburb. She swigs from an economy-size jug of Sunny D as she goes, filling up her bladder for the third home-pregnancy test of the day, trying to believe that the first two yielded false positives. It feels entirely apt that her trudge back to the corner store should be a ramble through a graphic-novelesque anti-wonderland, catching a tone that’s entirely apt. We’re used to seeing misfit girls like our protagonist in cartoon form. Her sisters in precocious cynicism include Ghost World’s Enid and M TV’s Daria, and half the pleasure of Juno lies in the casual way it cuts through her comic-book sarcasm and uncovers a three-dimensional soul.

The convenience-store clerk ( The Office’s Rainn Wilson) predicts the obvious in language typical of the film’s slangy screwball banter: “Your Eggo is preggo.” The father, Juno’s kinda-sorta boyfriend, is Paulie Bleeker, and because he’s played by Cera, who quivered and gulped as a junior neurotic on Arrested Development and in Superbad, he’s clearly not daddy material. Juno makes it as far as the abortion-clinic waiting room before deciding to give the kid up for

adoption. But what feelings will kick in when the baby starts kicking? And what do the prospective parents (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner) really share besides the mortgage on their immaculate McMansion? How’s it possible that material that seems more suitable for a Lifetime weepie instead forms the basis of an indie-pop comedy?

Material that seems more suitable
for a Lifetime weepie forms the
basis of an indie-pop comedy.

As directed by Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking), the movie builds from sitcom setups to wistful payoffs. He transforms characters who start out at as easy targets—the plastic yuppie adopters, Juno’s tacky and turtlenecked stepmom—into endearing humans, and fashions the relationship between snappy Juno and squeaky Paulie into a tender teen romance. Knocked Up surely provided some excellent pregnant-belly laughs last summer, but this must be the year’s truest riff on pending deliveries and burgeoning love.

There Will Be
Blood

DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, PAUL DANO

PARAMOUNT VAN TAGE, R

Oil’s not well in metaphorically
rich P. T. Anderson period piece

When Paul Thomas Anderson says blood, he means blood. In the director’s fifth feature—a stark Western loosely adapted from the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!—the deaths come blunt and nasty. But this being a parable of Old Testament vengeance and New World capitalism, the title also points to the baptismal water of evangelists and the petroleum deposits beneath the American earth. In the early 1900s, oilman Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis) and his motherless child trek to an arid stretch of California where the people

Youth Without
Youth ½

TIM ROTH, ALEXANDRA MARIA LARA

SONY PICTURES CLASSICS, R

Francis Coppola gives life to
a different kind of superhero

At age 70, Professor Dominic Matei (Roth) has a head aching from a decades-old work of scholarship he can’t finish and a heart scarred by a woman who did him wrong. This being Romania in 1938, current events do nothing to cheer the man up, and he’s about to poison himself when lightning literally strikes—a sci-fi thunderbolt that rejuvenates his body and supercharges his brain. Given his new powers to read books just by touching them and to perform feats of telekinesis that would impress the X-Men, the Nazis are keen to make his acquaintance, and the first half of Youth has the tension of a crack thriller. But director Francis Ford Coppola has rigged things so that the suspense story melts into a New Age puddle.

Greenwood
SPOTLIGHT ON THE MUSIC OF

There Will Be Blood

A study of excess that itself bounds over the top, There Will Be Blood delivers regular jolts of mania, many attributable to Daniel Day-Lewis’ turn as monstrous prospector Daniel Plainview, more yet radiating from Jonny Greenwood’s menacing score. Greenwood—a composer-in-residence at the BBC and also lead guitarist for a little band called Radiohead—lays in with punishing drones of strings and mad atonal swirls, figures that buzz and whir like an apocalyptic swarm of locusts. It’s the sound of avarice boring into Plainview’s soul with more force than an oil drill.

Marie-Josée Croze offers therapy in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.