Pictureland

It's significant that  one of the most moving bits of communication between daughter and father in Debra Granik's Leave No Trace is not an exchange of words.  It an occasional clicking sound, an affirmation between the child and parent.  It's a tolling of animal sympathy and understanding.  A simple, eloquent expression of love beyond speech.   Delivering her third memorable feature film, Debra Granik wrote the script with her long-time creative partner Anne Rosellini.  Their collaboration in the case Leave No Trace is a masterwork of understatement, if not blatant minimalism.  Both father Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), whom we first meet living secretly amid the lush vegetation of forested public lands somewhere outside of Portland, Oregon, tend toward the laconic in speech.  Granik and Rossellini, like their characters, speak mainly when they have something important to say. From this source, this minimal scri...

I think we knew The Bean was magical.   To the unitiated, the reflective sculpture more formally known as Cloud Gate, designed by Anish Kapoor for Chicago's Millennium Park, figures prominently in Duncan Jones' Source Code .  The film begins with two converging aerial perspectives of the city.   One glides in from Lake Michigan over an empty harbor, the elegant buildings of downtown looking slightly blanched, echoing the vegetation of early spring.   The relatively new Chicago park gets further star treatment when Frank Gehry's pedestrian bridge is photographed flatteringly from above, looking a snaking, metallic riverbed.  Interspersed with these shots are those of a commuter train speeding into the city.  Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) awakens on the train in a very agitated state, despite the presence of a lovely young woman (Michelle Monaghan) sitting before him who seems quite warmly disposed toward the jumpy man.  The last thing he ...