The story begins as a pair of 30-something fraternal twins, Simon and Jeanne, visit a lawyer for the reading their mother’s will. Her last wishes include a couple of requests and surprises; she wants each of them to deliver a letter, one to their formerly presumed dead father, and one to a brother they never knew existed. Simon is not interested in his mother’s game, but daughter Jeanne immediately takes off from her job and heads to an unnamed Middle Eastern country to find her father. She does not really know anything about her mother’s early life there and the story alternates between flashbacks bringing the audience into the history of the mother Nawal Marwan and her daughter’s odyssey.

I suggest anyone who goes to see the film first do a bit of reading about the Lebanese civil war since that is what the film seems to be based around. In flashback we find that Nawal was a young woman from a Christian family who fell in love with a (Palestinian) refugee and brought shame on her family. She had his son but was forced to give him up and leave the village to go and study in the city. Once there she became passionately involved in the political upheaval. Warning: Parts of this war story are harrowing, giving the audience Nawal’s close-up view of atrocities and torture. As Jeanne learns more and more about the mother she never really knew, she comes closer and closer to uncovering the shocking secrets Nawal could never bring herself to share with her children. Eventually Simon joins Jeanne and together they find what they were sent to find.

The film is long (130 min.), but I was never bored. It is apparently based on a play that ran to 4+ hours. Incendies is a very personal anti-war howl. At its center is a woman who survives the unimaginable and even in death finds a way to teach her children about love. It is not a movie for everyone. But for people who appreciate great acting, a slowly peeled onion of a story and haunting cinematography of a desert land being torn apart by war, Incendies is worth a viewing. It is intense, but satisfying. And it will stick with you for days.

It is in theaters now, but also available on Netflix and for sale.

It’s a combination political thriller, romantic drama, comedy, and conspiracy movie all rolled into one. It stars the extremely watchable Matt Damon as David Norris, a smooth, but sometimes careless New York politician whose fate – and ambitions – appear to change after a chance encounter with a beautiful ballet dancer named Elise (Emily Blunt).

The premise of the movie is that there’s a so-called “Adjustment Bureau” run by a “higher power” with a team of “agents” whose job it is to covertly make sure that people stick to a predetermined plan, or destiny. For reasons that grow clearer as the film progresses, the bureau is determined to keep David and Elise apart despite their obvious attraction. But the agents’ attempts to “adjust” David’s path become way more difficult after he discovers their existence and vows to exercise his own free will and be with the woman he loves. Game on.

The supporting cast includes John Slattery (Mad Men) as a conniving, yet amusing bureau boss, and Anthony Mackie as an underling who goes rogue. Are they good guys? Bad guys? Angels? Devils? Good question…

The Adjustment Bureau is like a very special (and trippy) crossover episode of Highway to Heaven and Touched By An Angel, with a bit of Oh, God! thrown in to the mix – and maybe even a bit of the recent mind-bender Inception.

The dialogue is snappy, Damon and Blunt are super-cute together, and the movie is thought-provoking enough to put it a notch above mindless entertainment – and into the realm of somewhat thought-provoking entertainment.

Ultimately, you have the power to control your own destiny and choose whether to see The Adjustment Bureau. Unless perhaps I’m a member of the Adjustment Bureau, secretly plotting to manipulate your thoughts and actions where movies are concerned…

I plead the fifth.

In 2007, journalist/filmmakers Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington spent 15 months on assignment for Vanity Fair, embedded with the Second Platoon, B Company, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley aka “the deadliest place on Earth.” Restrepo is the intimate documentary that chronicles the soldiers’ lives from their giddy plane ride over to their trip home.

The film is conspicuously free of political judgment. These guys are here to do a job. And in this case the job is to build a staging ground for the battles that need to be waged in this no-man’s-land. But it isn’t all heroics and battles, as you see in most war films. What strikes you is that these men are surrounded by an unseen enemy that may shoot at them from their hidden redoubt at any time, and yet they build their camp and come in at night to joke around and dance together to disco music.

The men name the camp Restrepo after a fallen comrade, and the specter of death is ever present. They have firefights with their invisible enemy on a regular basis, but it only punctuates the boredom. There are scenes of them meeting with locals and trying to root out the bad guys, but it is difficult to know who is good and bad here. And there are instances where they make fatal mistakes and innocents are collateral damage. You get the feeling that our guys are nearly flying blind, but they are so earnest and so young and you just know they are doing the best they can.

There are interviews with the men cut in throughout the film that were shot after they made it home. Most of the guys have not and may never get over the experience. The film also includes a battle scene where one of the men is killed that is just plain heartbreaking.

Restrepo is probably the closest to being in a war that many of us will get (I hope), but it gives you a very raw first hand look at what we ask of our young men in uniform (there are no women in this platoon.) It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and is nominated for the 2011 Academy Award. It isn’t any easy film to watch, but it should be seen by all.

From there Josh sets out to see what is going on in the rest of the country with this technology. Fracking is short for hydraulic fracturing and is the main method that gas companies us to extract natural gas worldwide. Basically, they drill a hole up to 20,000 ft deep and then pump water and lots of chemicals into it to fracture the rock and force the gas to the surface. Sounds benign, but as Josh discovers there are a multitude of problems for the people and animals living around these sites. Their water is contaminated beyond saving by the chemicals used in the drilling. They have lots of serious health problems that the gas companies refuse to admit any culpability for. There are toxic clouds emanating from the tanks on the sites.

A large part of the film is Josh on the road around the US, in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Texas. Here he meets family after family who have had their lives and livelihoods destroyed by natural gas drilling either on their land or close enough to despoil their air and water.

In addition, Josh talks with scientists, politicians and industry experts to find out why this is going on. You can guess who has what kinds of answers. Money talks and we find that government regulations don’t apply here; in fact, hydraulic fracturing was exempted from the Safe Drinking Water Act in the Bush-Cheney Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Gasland is most definitely activist film making. But it is also a very effective personal quest documentary that should be seen by everyone who thinks that natural gas is clean. The Natural Gas guys are lobbying hard to make sure that it doesn’t win the Academy Award it is nominated for. It is out on DVD. So rent or buy it now, before the gas company comes with the lease for your land.

Out in the jungle, the strongest creatures prevail by preying on the weakest. In the gritty drama Animal Kingdom, this dynamic is played out within a tight knit family of bank robbers and drug dealers in mid-1980s Melbourne. At the top of the food chain here is mama lion Janine Cody, played for all her ferociousness by 2011 Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver.

The center of the story is 17 year-old Joshua whose junkie mom was a Cody. The film begins with him sitting on a sofa beside her waiting for the paramedics to come and pronounce her dead. With nowhere to go, he calls his grandmother Janine and goes to live with the crime family his mom had kept away him from. His uncles are currently lying low because the ruthless Armed Robbery Squad has a hit out for Uncle Pope who is in hiding. Joshua is just trying to get through high school and have a normal relationship with a girl, but soon the family business ensnares him in their dirty dealings.

Mama Cody is all smiles and hugs, but beneath her chipper facade lies a calculating beast. She kissed her sons on the mouth (a little too long) and barely registers any emotion when her children die. She always has a way of looking on the bright side of the situation. But then the police arrest the brothers, and they see right away that Joshua may hold the key to bringing down the family. Detective Lecky (Guy Pearce) tries to get through to him, but he is no match for Mama Cody who has a much larger arsenal of tricks up her sleeve.

Uncle Pope is hands down the creepiest one of them all and when he thinks that Joshua might be turning on the family, he decides to leverage the only person that Joshua has on his side, his girlfriend. This psychotic family would do anything for their own survival. There are many twists and turns and killings and you’re not sure who is on who’s side. Or who is going to kill who. But you will have to watch it to find out who wins in the end.

Animal Kingdom is clearly more of a rooster flick, but some chicks would probably appreciate it, too. You must be into gritty crime dramas with a stomach for creepy characters. And if you want to see a stellar performance, Jacki Weaver’s Janine Cody makes the mother in The Fighter look like Mary Tyler Moore.

[It is out on DVD now, so watch it before the Oscars, if you can.]

Just comment (i.e. provide feedback/opinion) on a Chickflix review between Dec. 5th (12:01 a.m. ET) and Dec. 18th (11:59 p.m. ET) and your name/email will be placed in a random drawing. Good Luck!

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Looking for a good chick flick rental? Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is the perfect little piece of fluff. Set in London between the wars, it stars Frances McDormand as Guinevere Pettigrew, a middle aged governess who is let go from her job with no severance. The agency won’t give her another assignment, but she overhears a phone call about a job working for an American singer/actress and pretends to be the “social secretary” they were looking for. The American actress named Delysia (sounds like delicious) Lafosse is played by the ever-bubbly Amy Adams.

Delysia is young, pretty and ambitious. She is living with a nightclub owner (Mark Strong), flirting outrageously with a young theater producer (Tom Payne) to get the lead in his next play, and actually in love with a piano player (Lee Pace) who works with her at the nightclub. And juggling all these men and her very busy social schedule requires some help. Guinevere steps in, gets a quick makeover from her new boss, and just like Mary Poppins, she helps Delysia and everyone else sort out their problems. Of course, she mostly uses her common sense honesty, which seems quite foreign to all the high society folk that Delysia hangs out with.

Added to the mix is a handsome ladies’ underwear designer played by Ciarán Hinds who takes a shine to Guinevere, but has a fiancée who knows her secret. The entire film takes place in just one day and takes Guinevere from the streets to high society and back. But fear not, love wins out for both of the girls. Frances McDormand is lovely as Miss Pettigrew and Amy Adams is perfectly cast as the flighty ingénue. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is not deep, but it is a nice, sweet diversion for a couple of hours.

Nevertheless, as soon as The Cove was released on DVD, I put it in my Netflix queue and waited for it to become available. (Winning that Oscar meant there was a bit of a waiting list.) Then I got the notice that it was on its way to me and I steeled myself. But I have to give it to the filmmakers; they were smart. They took a very difficult to present subject and wrapped it in a very hip espionage thriller, making the horror part of a wider, more palatable story.

The main character of the film is Ric O’Barry who is in large part responsible for the world’s love of trained dolphins. In the 1960s he captured and trained 5 dolphins to perform in the TV show Flipper. He also played the Dad on the show. Only later did he come to understand what intelligent and sensitive creatures they are, and how cruel it is to capture and imprison them. This realization turned O’Barry into the world’s biggest dolphin advocate, and now he regularly takes on the Sea Worlds and international aquaria over their treatment of the animals. So when he finds out about Taijii, a small town in Japan, where they corral, cull and kill dolphins, he sets out to expose them.

But Taijii is prepared for O’Barry. In fact, the whole town is involved in covering up what is going on. The police keep him and his crew under constant surveillance. The local fishermen physically intimidate anyone with a camera. It is impossible to get to the hidden cove where the annual slaughter takes place. And so O’Barry puts together a team of high tech professionals who use hidden cameras, decoys, night vision goggles, all the tricks of the spy trade to get the story. And this is what makes this film worth watching. You are on the edge of your seat hoping they get the footage that will stop the dolphin slaughter.

Along the way, if you aren’t already, you fall in love with these beautiful creatures. And you thank God for people like O’Barry who cared enough to push the limits and get this tragedy into the public consciousness. The Cove is a rare documentary that has already made activists of a lot of its viewers. I recommend everyone see this film. Sure, there are some hard to take images, but it is an extremely well made movie about a very important subject.

The script for this film is very smart and very subtle, and the thing that makes this movie work is Ulhrich Muhe playing the character of Agent Wiesler, the Stasi officer in charge of this operation. Wiesler starts out as one of the bad guys, a cog in the police state machine, eager to put away anyone who says anything vaguely anti-socialist. But as this particular surveillance job continues, he develops a sympathy for the couple and when information that might be very damaging appears, he begins to alter his reports to reflect a more mundane cover story. The tension this creates is amazing. You’re not sure if he is playing a game. Will he decide to turn them in? Or will he get caught for his deceptions and thrown in jail himself? In the film’s opening, the audience is told that the East German secret police employed a network of 100,000 staff and 200,000 informants to spy on its own citizens. The motto of Stasi was the “Shield and Sword of the Party” and its stated goal was to “Know everything”. The feeling that everyone in the whole country is under surveillance and the pressure that it exerts on every moment of your everyday life is the creepiest part. By the end of the film, the Berlin Wall has come down and you really understand what a momentous occasion that was for these people in a way I never had before.

I highly recommend The Lives of Others for anyone who appreciates a great drama, with a great script and excellent acting. It is, of course, subtitled, but I was glued to it start to finish. And I cried, so bring some tissues.

(Upcoming note: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s second feature is The Tourist, filming now with Johnny Depp, Angelina Jolie, Paul Bettany and Rufus Sewell)

What sets this movie apart from most other “war films” is the silence. Instead of loud testosterone-driven battle scenes, The Hurt Locker is about the quiet, intense moments that are the norm for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit (EOD), a squad charged with finding and defusing all kinds of bombs in Iraq. It is a three-man team and the film begins with one of their own getting blown to bits. This clears the way for SFC William James (Jeremy Renner) to take his place as the bomb-defusing specialist on the team. The two other men on the team (played by Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) are there to provide him cover and are counting down the days until they get to go home, doing their best not to get killed. Sgt. James is not the same kind of team player that his predecessor was; he’s a lone wolf adrenaline junkie who collects souvenir scraps from all the bombs that he defuses and does not yearn to return to a quiet life stateside with his wife and kid.

Screenwriter Mark Boal’s experience as an embedded journalist in Baghdad serves him well in writing this story. And Director Kathryn Bigelow delivers some of the most tension filled scenes I’ve ever seen — not only when James is defusing bombs but also when the squad is searching for unexploded ordinance and watching out for insurgent bomb builders in a huge warehouse. There is only one real firefight which takes place in an isolated patch of desert, and it felt more real than most other movie shootouts in that our Army hero sharpshooters do not hit every shot. The three guys do ultimately bond and there is definitely some macho posturing, but it serves to define their individual characters.

As good as the other actors are, this is Jeremy Renner’s movie. It is about his journey and his Sgt. James sneaks up on you. He is more complex that you initially feel and by the end you sort of get him, despite his love of this life and death existence. This is not a movie for the faint of heart. Roosters will be into it for the bombs and buddy stuff. Chicks who enjoy a good character piece and who like edge of your seat well-crafted movies will appreciate it, too. I liked it because it was a story that takes place during a war, but was not about winning or losing. It was about the people who do the work.

Here’s a cool article about a unit in Afghanistan that does this kind of work.